Reflection Planning a Reading Programme: Day 5 RPI

This week's mahi was a deep dive into how to plan an effective and engaging reading programme that caters for a diverse group of learners in our classrooms.  Below are the ideas that resonated with me today and what I will be sharing back with my team and school over the next few weeks. 

Class Sites

When setting up a dedicated space for reading-related learning on a class site, keeping the Manaiakalani Programme's goals in mind will help guide our best practices: engagement, personalised learning, accelerated achievement, and empowerment. If the site is well-designed, it frees us up to focus on what we do best: teaching and responding to our students' reading needs,

Things to keep in mind when designing a class site:

•  "three-click" rule. Check how many clicks it takes for our learners or their whanau to get to this week's learning.
• Engagement is key! Think about creating a personalised space for our learners but remember, it shouldn't slow down the site. Make sure it's logical, efficient, and easy to navigate. 
• Don't forget the importance of bookmarks!
• Do we have clear, accessible spots on the site for learners to find independent resources and manage their learning on their own? 

Top tip: To check your site is visible, and everything is working, try out the site using an incognito window.

Teacher timetabling (‘rules of thumb’) 

A powerful discussion was around how to make the most use of the limited time we have in the school day by making sure we timetable our learning effectively.  When planning our week, consider how reading and literacy fit into our busy timetables. Reading time might not be confined to a designated block. We should look for opportunities before or after breaks for shared or independent reading.

When timetabling for learners we need to think about how to:

• manage our space while teaching
• enable learners to make choices and collaborate
• integrate valuable learning experiences
• empower learners to actively participate in their learning process

Recap on the Suggested Timetable Guidelines:

Literacy Sessions: Aim for 90 minutes per day, 4-5 days a week.

Reading Sessions: Schedule 45-50 minutes per day, 4-5 days a week.

Group Sessions:

Years 5-8: Teach two groups per day, each session lasting 45-50 minutes. Ensures that at-risk students are seen daily, while groups performing at or above expectations are seen twice a week. Groups below expectations should be seen more regularly, ideally three times a week or daily.

Something to try: Chunky Challenge - Incorporate morphology, syllables, prefixes, and suffixes into our literacy sessions.

Empowering Learners:

Something that kept coming up was how to empower our learners. First, we need to understand their learning needs and then structure and scaffold tasks accordingly. This might involve a teacher-directed tumble/taskboard or rotations approach or a more self-guided choice with a mahi tracker to support accountability. Adapting these specific approaches to your class and school's context is crucial as there is no 'one-size-fits-all' model.

A good reminder for my practice was to keep using digital tools for checking in with learners, such as screencast tools for "read to self" activities. This helps a teacher maintain a clear picture of their student's progress while freeing up teacher time at the same time.  However, the power of having regular teacher check-ins is essential to monitor and support learners effectively.

Digital reading apps - make sure they are fit for purpose!

Reading Like Writers (and other high-expectation activities)

The last few sessions of the day were about how to support our students to start making connections between readers and writers.  This involves supporting students to start thinking about how writers create meaning, and the tools/text features they use, which leads to deeper reading comprehension.

Encourage your learners to "magpie" forms, styles, language, and other features from the texts they read. This means borrowing elements to inspire their own writing, not copying directly from authors. This approach helps them develop their unique voice while learning from great examples. Helpful if you are not a confident writer yourself. To get a feel for what it is like to be 'in our student's shoes', Noami took us through a short writing activity.

Image yourself in this opening scene created by the author. As I read down what do you hear, see, feel, smell, and taste? Record words or phrases from the text that make you feel this way. Now write your own paragraph using the text as a guide.

My example - 

The forest felt alive that afternoon. The sound of bees buzzing busily in the dappled sunlight was almost deafening. Sighing, the old lady slumped down the rough tree trunk, resting on the damp mossy ground and glanced up at the old towering oak trees huddled around her.  “Am I lost,’ she whispered or “exactly where I need to be?”

This is a task I will be trying out in the following weeks as it links in nicely with our current writing programme. 

Another thought-provoking day with many little nuggets of new ideas to take back to my classroom and school.