Lockdown, Home Learning and Engage

On March 23 New Zealand went to Level 4 lockdown which means our school are closed.  The holidays were brought forward to help teachers prepare for a very different type of learning.  While our children remain at home, we have been preparing remote learning lessons for our children to start Term 2 on April 15.

We are attempting to deliver a range of curriculum lessons on line.  When making slides and videos about maths, writing and reading I have also made some videos of Engage games and use Engage cues to help the children participate in the games at home.

At a stressful time it is important to try and keep routines going and help the children maintain a link to school programmes.  I hope some of our children will practise these games and demonstrate them to their parents, showing the benefits of self regulation.

Using the Engage Programme For Inquiry 2020

This year I am using the Engage programme in my Inquiry to help children learn to manage their own learning and behaviour and in doing so, help them learn strategies to improve their achievement in writing.

My focus question will be:

Will using the Engage programme help children become more focused on their ability to write and help them make progress? 

The children I have chosen for my priority learners are a group of children who started school this year as well as one child who started at the end of last year.  They have a range of previous experiences of writing.  Some find the writing experience of generating a sentence and turning their ideas into a written sentence a challenge.  They are not confident and rely heavily on teacher support.  The "I can't.." attitude leads to them not attempting to write but sitting back and waiting for help.  They find difficulty focusing on instructions and some are constantly on the move.

I am hoping to help this group see that once they can learn and practise self regulation skills to manage their emotions and behaviour in an appropriate way, they will find that learning writing skills will be easier.

What is the Engage Programme?

The Engage programme developed by the University of Otago is a series of games that help the children practise self regulation skills. During the games the children are told what the game is teaching them in language they can understand - "Big slow breathing can help us to feel calm and relaxed." These cues can be used at other times throughout the day to remind the children when they need to be calm to help them learn.

The Engage programme has three domains to help the children to control their emotions (feelings), thoughts (thinking) and behaviours (doing). The emotional domain recognises and regulates emotions through breathing, movement and mindfulness. These games help children express themselves appropriately and manage their emotions. In the cognitive domain, the games help children attend to what is important, to ignore distractions and focus on and overcome a problem. Controlling impulses, taking turns and being patient are all part of the behavioural domain.

As the Engage programme can be used as a whole class activity, the children have time to practise the three domains each school day. By explicitly teaching these skills and talking about their emotions, the children are becoming more aware that they can control the outcome of their emotions. "Sprinkling" these ideas and skills over all the class, not just the priority group won't harm them but will benefit all. Already, it has made some children more aware of how to help those who find self regulation difficult.

What data will be gathered and how will it be assessed?

Data to assess their self regulation will be gathered, approximately every 5 weeks using a formal assessment observational rating scale used by the Engage programme ( Basc- 2 Behavioural Assessment scheme for children to assess functioning and SQD strengths and difficulties questionnaire which is an emotional and behaviour questionnaire).

Writing will be assessed using a checklist to assess skills they are using ie how they are developing their skills and how they are using their resilience to help themselves.  Do they sit back and expect the teacher to do all the work? Do they attempt to draw a picture and then make some marks for their story? Do they attempt to write their name and then seek help?  Or through self regulation understand that, I can remember what the teacher was telling me to do, I can keep going with difficult tasks and ignore my neighbour, I can deal with things not going to plan but I do need to try and it is OK to ask for help.

I will also gather audio recordings from our writing sessions perhaps once a fortnight to show progress. It is often the conversations between children that provide evidence of how they try and use the Engage programme to help them to stay focused, listen to and follow instructions and complete a task.

I hope this data, the check list and the audio will show if there has been any movement on the engage Programme scale and any corresponding progress with the children's writing.

  

2020 "Kai manu tonu te tumanako: Never Lose Hope"

Our school wide focus for 2020 is "kai manu tone te tumanako" or Never lose hope.  This is an important value - we all have hopes and dreams and we need to hold on to them.

As teachers we want to help our students hold on to their hopes and dream and help them succeed.  Teaching them confidence and creativity so that they can reach their goals in school as well as in life is one of the most important things we can do for our students.

To be able to help our students succeed we need to set clear and attainable goals, to help them develop strategies to obtain these goals and keep them motivated to use these strategies.  I am using the engage programme to help my students develop strategies to manage their emotions and behaviour  in an appropriate way so that they can use these strategies to attain their learning goals.

The Engage Programme

Self regulation allows children to manage their emotions, behaviour and body movement when they are faced with a difficult situation.  The Engage programme helps children learn to manage their emotions and behaviour in appropriate ways.  It teaches children how to think of different solutions when a situation changes - to stop and reflect on the situation and come up with a solution that keeps them calm instead of going into sensory overload and giving into frustrating outbursts.

Self regulation skills develop gradually.  Children need time to practise these skills and adults need to acknowledge that it is sometimes hard.  Giving children choices throughout the day gives them opportunities to practise and develop decision making skills and it also gives them a sense of having a sense of mastery over their own life.

"Tired Flopsy Bunnies"

The best way to help children practise self regulation is to play games.  Games are fun and present different challenges that are important.  You need to follow rules, take turns, pay attention, shift your focus and inhibit impulses if you want to win.

I introduced the programme to my class using the breathing and relaxation exercises.  Most children responded well.  They listened to the instructions and were able to take big slow breathes to help them feel calm.  Those who find it hard to keep calm during class found it hard to lie still but with practise and seeing others doing the exercises they realised it was important to try and keep calm to be like the others.

Games like "Musical Statues" and "Duck, Duck, Goose" were already favourites but by giving them information on why we were playing them it gave a different emphasis to the games.  Other games such as "Think or Say" also helped in reinforcing the idea of kindness and the Point England Way of doing things.

Cognitive and thinking games requiring reminding that if they didn't succeed at first someone could always join in and help them.  This form of cooperation helped overcome initial reluctance of some of the children to do puzzles.  "Hot Potato" was one of the few games that the children found it difficult to remain calm.  There were often arguments when someone passed the object on too quickly when the music stopped which resulted in discussions about how and why we were playing the game to try to calm the situation.

Behavioural and Doing activities were sometimes modified when the weather didn't permit us to get outside and use a bigger space.  For example "Hide and Seek" was modified to a circle game of one person hiding a small object and getting someone to guess who had the object.

Curled up like a hedgehog

By the end of the term the children were adapting other games they knew.  "Whispers" was used to give simple instructions and they thought of other animal poses to add to their yoga exercises.  This came about after a trip to the zoo or from a story that suggested a way an animal behaved.

In 2020 I want to plan the exercises to be included in class activities, three times a day, but also allow for spontaneity so that if a different game would be more appropriate to be prepared to swap games.  I would like to inquire into how useful the Engage programme is in helping children remember instructions, ignore distractions and work well with others. 

"I'm like a hanging bat," said AJ

Small trees or shrubs

A forest of trees.

Looking out the window at the trees inspired Ace to try and be a tree.  "It's harder than you think," said Ace

Helping children to develop these skills will be something that I hope will be of huge value through out their life. 

Inquiry 2019: Summing up

At the beginning of the year our focus was on phonics and improving the children's sight words.  Our attention has now turned to comprehension and being able to read with speed, accuracy and expression.

Some of my priority students are struggling with fluency.  They read each. word. like. this.  I have been trying several approaches to try to find different ways to help my robot readers.  We continue to have "reading to".  This is so the children have a modal of what reading sounds like.  With a familiar book the children often join in the parts they know and we try to make it sound just like talking.

Being able to recognise sight words quickly at each level and to have graphics of how the children are doing has encouraged many children to keep on learning.  This is also helping their fluency.  Knowing a lot of sight words is helping to make their reading sound less awkward.

Team one has incorporated into this term's Inquiry topic a lot of fairytales.  The children are enjoying making up small "plays" about their favourite part of a fairytale.  This helps the children make the scripts come alive through their voices.

We still do choral reading so the children can hear each other read.  Children have been heard telling others - "you need to make it sound like talking and not like a robot" as they try to help each other.  Also the children are having fun with the repetitive phrases in various fairytales as well as listening to or joining in as a model reads at a good pace and has good phrasing.

As my groups have spread out through the levels I now have some children in a group of their own.  This gives me time to be able to read together or do echo reading where I point as I read (as a model) and then get the child do the same.  This reading time on their own gives them more confidence to attempt different strategies without the fear of making mistakes in front of their peers.

Being able to record themselves reading part or all, of the text they have read as a group, is a great aid to hearing what they sound like.  They can play it back and hear when it sounded good, when it sounded not so good and to discuss why do you think it sound good or not so good.  It might be that they had trouble pronouncing a word or how the text said something, was not how they would say it so they slowed down and reverted to word. by. word. reading as they work on each word.  These discussions are helpful.

When beginning to learn to read, we get children to point to each word.  This gets the children use to seeing that they need to say each word that is written in the text and they can easily see if they are putting in extra words.  Running a finger under an unknown word draws attention to that word - you need to take notice of the letters and the order of them to be able to recognise it again.  By late red to early yellow books (if not earlier) we want children to drop this habit as the eyes track faster than a finger and reading can become word by word without fluency.  Some of my readers have found this a hard habit to break.

We have been practising fluency by also reading up to punctuation or a card, modelling short phrases and getting the children to read it several times to hear the difference.  Rereading a familiar book at the beginning of our reading lessons, or by taking them down a level or two it is helping them practise fluency by not having to figure out the words but just to concentrate on fluency has been helpful.  Scooping a finger under a group of words to form phrases within a sentence is another way of helping children see how to make a phrase.  This is helpful for some being a multi sensory task - the children are using their eyes (visual reading), using their voice (oral speaking) as well as touching (physically scooping along the page) all at the same time but can hark back to finger pointing and be a backward step for others.

Incorrect phrasing and slow word by word reading can impede comprehension.  Texts are longer in the higher levels so there is more details to remember.  This is our present focus as with end of year testing taking place the children are able to decode but comprehension is letting them down particularly with inference questions.

So what has worked and what hasn't worked?  Having a literacy programme that is very focused and teaches children the importance of noticing has helped all my priority learners make progress.  This may not have been at a pace that would let them reach expectations after a year at school but they have learnt good strategies to use on unknown words and they have all made progress.  Reading each night has also shown the difference between the rate of progress and maintaining it.

What would I do differently?  I would like to devote some time to have individualised reading.  How this would look and how often it could take place would require some further thought.  Reading by themselves is one way to quickly see or hear what strategies they can use, or what they still need to practise, teach only what they need to know and plan "where to from here?" to help them even further. 

I would like to implement a similar focussed approach next year.  Making the learning of words into a competition has spurred a group of children on to learning a good bank of words to help with their reading and writing.  This does take time with setting up lists and then testing but if it is a strategy that helps even just some children it is worthwhile in the long run.  The purposeful noticing and explaining what they are doing and why, helps the children to choose what strategy would be best to use on an unknown word.

To be able to enjoy the process of reading and to understand what they are reading, children need to be able to read text accurately, at a reasonable pace and with expression and phrasing.  It is to this end we have been systematically working through phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency this year.


   

Moving onwards and upwards

For our 5 year olds learning to read, it can be a huge shift of focus from the first five years of life when everything evolves around the spoken mode of communicating.  They have been learning to talk with adults and peers but suddenly the focus is on obtaining meaning from a written code.   Some children find that they are easily able to acquire the skills needed while others need support, explicit teaching and time to practice these new skills.

For my priority learners I have found that they have all needed a lot of encouragement to see that new skills will become easier and easier with time, practise and patience.  We have spent three terms getting to where they are now and when they come to an unknown word they know they can at least attempt to find a way to unlock the code and see that they are making progress.  It is exciting to watch them in their attempts and the joy when they succeed.

The skills need to be taught in a certain order starting with the more simpler up to the more complex.  Starting with simple phonics instruction of the alphabet has helped everyone not just my priority learners.  It is not something that will prevent some children continuing to have difficulty but on the whole it is helpful to most children.

"Explicit teaching of alphabetic decoding skills is helpful for all children, harmful to none, and crucial for some."
(Professor Catherine Snow and Emeritus Professor Connie Juel Harvard University 2005)

English is a "rules-governed" language even if there is an awful lot of rules to learn!  So starting simple with one to one correspondence between sounds and letter combinations, practising and consolidating and moving on to the more complex makes sense.

We have been looking at the 26 letters and learning that they are used to make 44 speech sounds and up to 120 graphemes.  If a child is trying to read the word "shoe" focusing on the initial letter won't be helpful but knowing that the letter combination of an "s" and an "h" makes the digraph "sh" will help.

When a child comes to an unknown word, I try to give them time to work out what strategy to use.  If they need assistance I try to help them clarify their thinking as to how to "attack" a word or what would be the best strategy to use instead of telling them the word outright or saying exactly what strategy to use.  Prompts such as "Look for something that would help you" or "Remember the word you found tricky yesterday and I said you might need it again".  These sort of prompts help the child notice and think "I need to pay attention here."  It is this noticing that has made a big difference with both reading and writing.  They know that they need to "think" when they are reading and writing. 

Reading the predictable texts of the lower reading books gives a child confidence but knowing that only one word per page changes and that word is pictured on the opposite page doesn't give the child a skill that they can use with certainty.  Guessing an easily identifiable pattern is more like reciting a text than reading.  Guessing a word from a picture diverts a child's attention away from the text that contains all the information they need to be able to read.  It is for this reason that I moved my readers off the early readers and on to the red level fairly quickly so that they could see that they needed to use the phonemic skills they are being taught to gain meaning from the text.

"Reading to" is still very much part of our literacy programme.  It is where the children hear words and sentences of all kinds.  Words that are complex, rhyming, non sensical but trip off the tongue to show how rich our language is.  It also exposes children to sentence structure and the structure of a narrative story something which they will need in story writing.  It is usually an enjoyable time for listeners and the reader with discussions taking place and vocabulary explored in a fun way.

Phonics and phonemic awareness are just two decoding skills.  They can help a child decode or read words but reading is also about gaining meaning from words.  Using a range of texts now that the children are reading texts at a higher level is helping the children see that books don't just tell a simple story.  We can learn facts and information too.  Books can help us use prediction and questioning strategies and help us think about our own experiences.

In writing the children are beginning to see the value of phonemic awareness.  It is a "two for one deal" in that it helps them read as well as helps them transfer their spoken stories into a written code. 
Moving through phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary and now comprehension and fluency is helping my priority learners become more efficient at decoding as well as understanding what they are reading.  Being able to do this will not only help them read the lines of printed words but also to "read between the lines" and to pick up inferences and nuances.

So teaching a repertoire of strategies has been most effective in meeting the needs of my priority learners.  Knowing my learners and being very encouraging,  systematically introducing phonemic awareness and phonics and working at the learners pace have all helped my priority learners come a long way on their literacy journey.

Inquiry End of Term 3 2019

Expanding Skill Bases

This term has seen the priority learners expanding their literacy skills and learning to manipulate sounds in unfamiliar words in their reading as well as in their writing.  This is giving the children a degree of independency in learning to recognise words and how to write words they need.  They are learning to develop their phonemic awareness using a wider range of skills and to know that some letters represent one sound in one word but a different sound in another word.  Some letters when put together make a completely different sound.

In reading they are learning to distinguish sounds at the beginning of a word, in the middle of a word and at the end of a word.  This means they have to listen carefully to the different sounds in letters as they try to use their newly learnt skills.  Perhaps it is thinking of a word that begins with the same sound, isolating just a single sound within the word, blending individual sounds into a word or breaking a word into individual sounds.  Manipulating sounds by being able to change, move or modify the individual sounds in a word is another important skill that the children are beginning to be aware of.

To use any of these skills the children are really "thinking" as they reading.  They know they need to  attend to or notice the letter components of a word and the sequencing to work out what skills are needed to help decode unknown words.  If one strategy doesn't help they need to be able to switch tack and choose a different strategy.  They are learning that some strategies may be more helpful on a word than another and to at least try something different instead of appealing to the teacher.

It is important that they remember to use these skills as they are moving up to levels where the books are longer and the challenges of a larger, more complex vocabulary is greater.  Three of the children are now reading at Level 11/12 and the other child is reading at Level 8/9.

In writing they are being encouraged to record sounds even if they aren't able to record every sound in the word and move on to complete their story, going back and editing later.  This is giving them more confidence with their writing - they are not getting stuck on one word and leaving the task incomplete.  They are writing three or four sentences and on the whole making some good approximations of unknown words and being proud of their efforts.  Their enthusiasm to write each day is great to see along with the writing they are doing in their own time.  Some of the words and phrases they are using are not coming from the writing discussions but from books that we read aloud and they have remembered.  This is something new.

Unsupported writing is still formulaic in ideas - "I went to ..." as it is easy and something they know how to write but one of the children is starting to try and include speech with what was said in the story.  Spelling is mainly high frequency words but with the beginnings of "inventive" spelling.  It is good to see that being unsupported they are trying hard to be resourceful and use their knowledge to complete the task.

Looking at how many correct words they can write in 10 minutes is also improving.  One child can write 19 correct words with the highest being 35.  These include topic words, high frequency words and well as word families.  All these children are still striving to learn words from their word lists.

Other ways to encourage enthusiasm for writing are dictation iPad activities, learning to say and write words and games and listening skill activities such as Chinese Whispers, "I went Shopping and bought...", oral cloze games and rhyming "I Spy".  These games and activities give the children time to practise their skills in a fun way.

It is exciting to see the children on the way to becoming "code breaker" and "meaning maker" word detectives by progressing up the continuum of learning phonics even if they still need support as they practise their skills.