2016 Inquiry Focus
School-wide Focus: Formative practice in reading/writing to improve students achievement.
My Inquiry Focus: Track students use of of vocabulary in writing to measure the impact of the vocabulary expansion programme.
Term 1: Looking at de-constructing and re-constructing (re-crafting) writing collaboratively.
The end of 2015 required us to reflect on our inquiries and see where we could make improvements. In the process, a lot of data crunching was done, and out of this came some clear pointers for where to start for 2016.
A clear outcome was how poorly students did in the vocabulary section for tests such as PAT, STAR and running records. It was also evident in their writing that students level of vocabulary was not up to the national standard for year 7 and 8 students.
So this clearly stated to me what problem my learners were faced with, and I also had actual data to support this. My next step then was to develop an action plan of how I was going to address this in term 1.
I've decided to attack this from a writing angle (de-constructing simple paragraphs and re-constructing to make them sound more interesting) and then slowly make links towards their reading tasks during small group discussions.
Another change I've made in my literacy program was making time to 'read to' my class using novels so they are exposed to higher level vocabulary.
Watch this space too see how this works out.
I think you have identified a problem many of our learners have. It does become very obvious, and a real barrier for them at Year 7-8 because vocab is such a huge part of comprehension in reading and communication of meaning in writing.
ReplyDeleteKeeping up the reading to your class is a good idea to help expose them to new vocab in context.
I look forward to seeing how you de-construction and re-construction of writing goes.