Three is a magic number for making sites about dung

Despite feeling a bit under the weather I was looking forward to another Tuesday of learning, and I haven't been let down.

We met Danni Stone, our Year 7/8 Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu partner from Point England. She was here to teach us all about Google Sites. It was lovely to meet her and to make the face to face connection. She is very knowledgable and helpful, also willing to share her journey of how things have evolved over the 5 plus years she has been on this Learn Create Share journey.

Dorothy introduced us to today's theme of create. Create is such a powerful tool to use. I took many notes as she spoke but here are a couple of standouts:

• Creativity is a doing word … the whole parts of our body, not just a screen.
• The digital world can give us a world that turbocharges our creativity … but it isn’t the be-all and end-all … it is one part of the wedge. (see graphic to see the different parts of the wedge)
• Digital can capture the creativity.
• We don’t want our learners to be consumers, we want them to be creators. 
• Students that take more responsibility for selecting topics to learn about and this lead to accelerated learning. 
• Create: empowering through choice, information/knowledge, developing skills, building capacity & scaffolding.

"Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery. In children, creativity develops from their experiences with the process, rather than concern for the finished product. Creativity is not to be confused with talent, skill, or intelligence. Creativity is not about doing something better than others, it is about thinking, exploring, discovering, and imagining" (Kohl, 2008).

All this information has made me ask the question: 

Does our YMS belief mean that we only think it is about the digital? Do we ignore the other wedges of creativity from the classes that are using digital devices more than the juniors?

Sadly, we don't get much time to verbally process this information. Sometimes I wonder if it would help me work through what we are already doing in our class/school before we move on. I know my brain can be like a sieve and things come and go as fast as Katy Perry changes her hairstyle.

(or Mel Raisin 😊😊)

The rest of the day was spent with Danni taking us through Google Sites. I have some experience using sites but it was great having some sandpit time. The tips on this slide are fantastic, especially the size for headers and buttons.

In anticipation of the opportunity to do some creating, I had brought along a new Sharp Reading resource on Insects. We have been able to create our own site which we will be able to use for half our class for reading next week. It was great to be working on it with my fab work wife. Angela hasn't had a lot of time on creating sites and I think she found it helpful.

It was also interesting learning about Dung Beetles. We aren't quite happy with it but the bones are there. A bit of tweaking and we will be away.

Our Site

What do you think about it? What would you suggest?

Does motivation make a difference to students engagement in reading?

During the holidays I met with Kelsey to hear about some learning she had experienced a few weeks back. She shared her and Mark's notes with me, as well as explaining an overview of what they had covered. The discussion was around how we engage students in reading.

In writing we take time to hook the students in with something, we try and get them excited and interested in what they are going to write about. But we don't do it with reading. Usually, we give them a book or journal and tell them what to read. There is no choice left with them. But we expect that they will be excited and engaged with reading because it's reading.

The speaker Dr Rebecca Jessen said "Motivation does not predict reading achievement however engagement does. The hook gets engagement and leads to increased motivation and reading achievement. Relevance especially culturally is critical for engagement."

Kelsey shared about what Wigram Kereru community are going to be doing to engage their readers and it made me think about what we need to do. While we have given a little bit of choice around one or two things (the novel study group got to choose their book, they have a choice in the way they present activities) we don't really give them any choice about all of it.

Because of the timing, I didn't feel that we would be able to change everything for the term, plus our class runs a bit more traditionally than Kereru, however, I do want to see if creating excitement and interest before beginning makes a big difference in their achievement.

I decided to start with two areas that I could, without changing everything.

Shared Story: While we have decided to follow the Chapter Chat choice and read the book Holes to the class I wondered if I could help create excitement around this book by the way we introduce it to the class and the way in which they first engage with the follow-up work.

Novel Study Group: There are two books for the students to choose from, one we chose and one the students chose. I wondered if there was some way I could hook the students in, get them to choose the first book they read and get them excited about the reading for the term.

With these wondering questions in mind, I decided to try a few things.

Shared Story:

• I created the Slide to help engage interest and prior knowledge in the story.

• I decided to create excitement around the story by putting the book into a box and creating 'clues' that needed to be opened on the first day. 

The students were very intrigued by the box and curious to know what was in it. Lots of discussion and noise was created as we opened and talked about what the clues could mean. Watch the video below. 

The clues gave way to some discussion around what it all could mean. My class blog entry shared some of the ideas that they came up with.

It was great to hear everyone being creative, despite a few students knowing things about the book. I was open to having a student say they thought it would be a book called Holes but because it was amongst other suggestions we didn't dwell on that. It was helpful having Angela saying she thought it was going to be a puppy, the children got into this idea.

We read the first couple of chapters because they wanted it and so far they seem to be enjoying it. Tracking of the work they complete and the responses during discussions should give us some indication of how engaged they are with the book. I would hope to see an increase in the depth of answers and creativity in the creative DLO's. 

Novel Study: 

In light of the idea that we need to give ownership and choice to the students, I created this slide for students to choose to know about the books and knowing what work they would need to do. 

I also thought through how I could enhance the activities that the students need to do so that they don't just answer a bunch of comprehension and vocab questions. I want them to deepen their understanding of the book and to extend their creativity in the way they answer so that it shows their depth of understanding. 

Kelsey also shared that Dorothy Burt felt that teachers do far too much of the work and that we aren't allowing students to do some of this checking. After a term of struggling to keep on top of the marking, I would have to agree so I wanted to include this in the work. 

So my follow-up activities include peer checking, peer work and creativity with choice. There are still comprehension questions and vocab questions but I have encouraged pair conversation and will aim to use some of the critical literacy lessons with this group to develop more of these skills. I am thinking about testing them again at the end of the term to see if this makes a difference to their results, though we will test early Term 4 so I may wait till then. 

What about the rest of the class?

This is an area that currently I have left as is. I do need to develop this but currently, time and a question around how to do this well, while still developing the reading skills using Sharp Reading is stopping me from moving forward at this stage. I would like to explore how Wigram manage their programme further as I feel that will help me with some of my thinking. 

What questions do you think I should be asking? What ideas do you have around Critical Literacy and engaging readers? I would appreciate peoples thoughts on what I have written.