Zoe's Teaching Standards Site

 Recently I have completed t2 webinars on Structured Literacy. These were very beneficial to understand the overall ideas about SL and how the brain works. It gave a good insight into what we are doing and how this programme with benefit many of our students. 

Yesterday we had a TOD which was going to be in Cromwell with all the other Area Schools in our Kahui Ako, however, for obvious reasons this was not going to happen. The day was based around Deep Learning and we had a keynote speaker - Joanne Quinn - who showed some deep learning examples from around the world. She focused on the four quadrants of Deep Learning and showed how this was done within the examples she showed.  Throughout the day we also had cohort group meetings and a school meeting with Joanne Barr who is our Core Facilitator this year. 

 Yesterday the Junior School teachers and Jennie travelled to Wanaka to visit Holy Family School. There were many different schools visiting along with us. This school was demonstrating the Structured Literacy model and showing how it worked across their school. I found it very worthwhile going to visit and learned a lot about how the programme works. As a school we liked the spelling programme and could see this being beneficial to our students. 

 In term three, and also in term 4, we put together our biannual drama production - Let Loose. Students auditioned for a role that they wanted and then, if successful, had to learn their lines and become the character they were portraying. Practices were held most weeks and leading up to the final performance, several times a week.  It was great to be able to still put our performance on to an audience, even if Covid times, and I hope that the parents enjoyed the production.

Going into lockdown with no warning was difficult to get appropriate resources to all students. Unfortunately we didn't have the right number of chargers for every household but the students who did do work did well. It was good to be able to check on work and mark things from home but also frustrating when students wouldn't check emails or respond to comments on work.  I really enjoyed catching up with students on Zoom. I tried to make it as fun as possible with games too.  If we had to go into lockdown again I think I would keep lots of things the same. We do need to come up with a solution for the charger issue. 

 In term 2 I started an ALiM group with 4 students, 3 year 6 and 1 year 5 student. There was a major focus on Multiplicative Thinking for my group because that was the whole class focus for most of term 2.  I used the Learning Progressions Framework to gauge some ideas of activities and where to base the learning at. I also took their 2020 GloSS data, as well as my overall teacher judgement on where they were at.  Once we had finished the Mult/Div unit in class we moved on to algebra which I also focused on in the ALiM group.  There was some great progress within the mult/div aspect of mathematics which was very pleasing. 3 of the 4 students made acceleration in the 10 weeks.  In term 3 I have started the second ALiM group which is a group of 5 year 5 students. This group is focusing on fractions.

This year we have had two teacher only days both with a focus on Local Curriculum. The first day was 11/5/21. We planned 2 inquiry units - the first was a Gold Rush, Lawrence History plan and the second was a Matariki inquiry/art unit.   The second day was the 16/8/21. We had another focus on the local curriculum and how we can include this on our unit planning. We also spent time on whanaungatanga.