Mia's Teaching Journey

I have basically achieved my goals of getting my children to 1) Have a go at writing independently 2) Find HFWs on the blue card 3) Attempt unknown words by recording initial sounds and recording them. Due to the big focus on the basics I feel my top writers have missed out - now that the rest of the class has gained the skills they need I need to look at where to next → Essentially for my bottom bottom writers I am going to continue on with what I was doing in term 1 - they still need lots of HF words work - 4 of them are in RR so they are getting extra help this. FOCUS FOR THE REST OF CLASS: Get them to think about their AUDIENCE - how can they make their writing more interesting? Model adding in adjectives - haven’t spoken at all about these this year so will need to introduce this and talk about adding detail. They have got the sentence structure and basic skills they now need - so to sum up my Term 3 aim it is to create ‘Juicier Writing’.

Term 2: Reflecting on last terms inquiry; looking into improving my student's writing - I would like to continue on the same path this term. My priority learners will be experiencing what I like to call a 'Blue Butterfly Card Blitz'. I will be focusing on teaching my learners how to use the card by: recognising and reading the HF words on it. Looking at the year 2 writing exemplars I notice that to be at there is huge jump is the vocabulary that they are expected to be using. I will be looking at ways that I can enrich my children's vocabulary in writing. I plan to do this by: Reading to the class at least twice a day. Gifting more words to the children during guided writing time.

School wide focus: Formative practice in reading and writing to improve student achievement. The problem i’ve identified for my learners is that they are not writing sentences independently. There are two reasons for this: They get stuck on difficult words. They can’t find and use HFWs (high frequency words) on yellow and blue butterfly cards Learners are not attempting unknown words by using butterfly cards or known letter sounds. Solution Ideas: There are some other teacher addressing this HFWs Re-jig writing programme so that children who aren’t working with the Teacher are doing writing HF word, letter sound activities that will actually help them with their writing - until they are able to write independently. Focus on, read from, chant, play games with words on cards Attempting unknown words Model the thinking and trying unknown words in writing modelling (show them how you attempt words and underline without getting it right) Teach letter