Superhero - by Leki Jackson-Bourke

 Back in term 1our room 2 literacy class completed a whole class text called Superhero by Leki Jackson-Bourke. Our whole class loved the storyline and finding out it was actually based on true events that happened to Leki himself. This resonated with students in class and encourage them to participate in our dress up day where they got to dress up in their favourite superhero and explain what their powers were. Check out our movie we finally got around to sharing.

RPI: Creating

Today's session was a very hands on creating day filled short, sharp and longer create tasks that can be used to help embed ideas and capture readers interest from your students. 

Dorothy took us through the pedagogy and research behind WHY create is so imperative to our teaching and student learning. We are the gatekeepers! We need to make time and intentionally provide opportunities for create in our students' learning. 

Check out my slide deck for some of our create tasks.

Slide 1 - Creative illustrator and performer - We used one of the 2 prompts provided to come up with our own take on an image that would match the text. I created mine using Gemini as it is provided for our students in their Google suite. Other apps suggested were Craiyon and Canva. 

Slide 2 - 'Tighter & looser' session - This gave us ideas on how tight or loose we made our scaffolds/templates for the student create tasks. We were provided with many ideas of the types of templates, then had to create our own based on a text we were planning to use in the up coming weeks. My text was about Lizards in the L2 School Journing - June 2024. 

Slide 3 - One shot film - We got to create a book trailer to try and sell a text to our class. I used quick time to record mine on my laptop in one of our podcasting rooms with the blue background. I then used imovie to put in the blue screen and produce my promo video for Selina Tusitala Marsh's book - Mop Head.

Kiri also took us through some great examples of longer create units that have been used throughout the different clusters. These are great examples I'd really like to get to one day - especially if I get a chance to start novels with a group of higher readers in my class. 

One thing I will be implementing next week - Will be a short create task before we read the whole text - just like we did in todays lesson. And I will also make an effort to make time for a 'tight' create task for all my groups next week.

RPI: Day 7 - Thinking

 Today's RPI session covered 'Thinking' - more specifically Critical thinking and how we can expose, model and extract this from our learners in our classes.

Dorothy Burt started us off strong with an overview and reminder of our Cybersmart features available to all to ensure our students are being smart citizens online.

Next Naomi covered an integral part of why and how we cover reading in our session about higher order thinking.

Helping Students Think Deeply About What They Read

Good reading lessons aren’t just about reading the words — they’re about helping students think. The Effective Literacy Strategies remind us to plan for different levels of thinking: literal (what the text says), interpretative (what the text means), and evaluative (what we think about it). The deeper thinking happens when we go “above the line” — this is called higher order thinking. At this level, students are not just understanding a text, they’re analysing, evaluating, and even creating new ideas. Tools like Bloom’s Taxonomy and Solo Taxonomy help us plan these kinds of lessons, where students think more deeply and make stronger connections.

To help students understand this kind of thinking, it can help to use simple examples. We might say that learners start out like magpies — gathering interesting words and ideas from texts. But when they begin to think more deeply, they become like hawks — flying high, looking closely, and noticing things others might miss. This kind of thinking helps students realise that language has power. Authors make choices to guide how we think or feel, and readers can notice and question that. When we plan lessons that include these kinds of thinking, we help our students become smarter readers and better thinkers.

I thoroughly enjoyed our session on Perspectives and Positioning.

Kiri's session about using provocations helps students become deeper thinkers. Instead of asking easy questions, a provocation makes a strong statement that not everyone will agree with. This gets students talking, thinking, and sharing different opinions. It encourages them to explain their ideas and look more closely at what a text is really saying. This is part of building critical literacy — helping students see that language has power, and that authors can influence how we think. When we use provocations, we help students go beyond surface-level understanding and think about whose voices are being heard and what messages are being shared.

Part of our homework was to bring a text - My chosen text was Bok Choy - Paul Mason. As part of our perspectives and positioning activity we shared on Canva a provocation from our text, as well as an opportunities for students to respond - called 'create to resist' - this encouraged us to think what opportunities will learners have to make different choices as authors or creaters. Below is what I came up with for my chosen text.

Below is what I am committing to follow through with in the weeks to come. I've already started creating some of my response to text tasks here in our session today, and I look forward to implementing my extended discussions using the provocations we shared. 

End of Term 2 Update

 The end of term seemed like a distant event that would take a while to get to. But in true busy school term fashion, it has landed upon us with a bang and a rush to complete all our many mini projects and marking.

The last few weeks have been tough but rewarding at the same time. From our reports deadlines in week 6, to prepping for ERO in week 8. We had an amazing celebration of Matariki with our Dawn Service led by Matua Willis - it really was a great understanding and feeling of welcoming in the Maori New Year, Remembering our loved ones who have passed and setting new goals for the future. Check out a little snippet of our morning.

In terms of my inquiry, I'll be posting up during the holidays the running records results from the mid-year testing as well as our OTJ's that went out as part of our learners reports.

RPI: Day 5 - Planning reading for the wider programme of learning

 I really enjoyed todays sessions about reading and can finally say I have caught up homework from Day 3 and Day 4 of RPI. As I only have 3 days a week in class, I have to make sure I am super organised to try and implement or try out some of the activities and programmes we cover so that I am able to collect sufficient evidence and also students get a decent go with me in class.

Dorothy's session this morning covered the 3 click rule around our learning sites and what we need to ensure students learning is visible. I feel my team do this very well and have been doing so for a few years now. An area of improvement for our own site would be to intentional with have the following elements as shown in the slide below. 

Another part of todays session covered 'Reading Apprenticeship' - I definitely need to implement the use of this specific language so students know what is expected when they are asked to move into these groups. Reading Apprenticeship - is the metacognitive discussion on reading processes. This is for students and led by students. 

One part I really enjoyed today was in our breakout groups. My group was with Naomi and our session was called "read like writers and write like readers". This was great fun and she's modelled it just like how we could for our students. This reminded me of some PD we did some 10+ years ago called 'Reading - writing links' by Rebecca Jesson and she called it "cameo texts". I really enjoyed this session because as Naomi shared, it definitely beats trying to get 2 alliterations or 'make sure you use at least one simile'. But rather students have an extract of text which models exactly what you would like your students to replicate. The hardest part for me in creating this would be creating the scaffolded part especially when you want to use more than one text.

Having us teachers model and try out some "Think Alouds" today was very useful as without the practice and monitoring from our facilitators we probably wouldn't be doing this justice or even doing it wrong. 

I will also aim to have a better go at collecting text sets from EPIC to help with reading in class. Overall another super useful session and I look forward to using some think alouds in class.

RPI: Guided reading observations - reflections

 One part of our homework for RPI was to observe a couple of groups using one of the following tools for observation. Although I have year 7 and 8 learners, my highest reading age is 9.5 years old. So I decided to use just a scarp piece of paper to record reading strategies and behaviours shown by my different groups. Below is one of my lower level groups.

This proved very helpful as each student was able to see my feedback on their piece of paper, then take that paper away as part of their follow up activity with their support staff. This was also very useful anecdotal notes for both myself and students to see what they are doing well, when breaking up unknown words, and reminders to not skip over the simple words they already knew.

My higher level readers also got a taste of reading aloud together but at their own pace. I must admit, we spend so much time unpacking texts, and working on extended discussion, I have been expecting students to read the text independently before coming to see the teacher. So this was refreshing to see and hear students fluency, pronunciations and word attack skills still being used at a higher reading level when their main focus is reading to learn, rather than learning to read.

My hope is more check points and modelling of this as a whole class, will go well towards the overall reading fluency and improvement in reading for all students.

1st South and East Auckland Maths Challenge for 2025

 Ever wanted to hook competitive kids into maths? Now's your chance! 

Last week Pt England hosted the South and East Auckland Maths Challenge hosted by Katalina Ma from Auckland University. This is our 4th time joining the competition and our 2nd time hosting. 

This time we had great competition from Panmure Bridge and Glen Taylor joining us for the first time. The South Auckland schools who also competed were South Auckland Middle School, Viscount, Mangere Central and De La Salle.

Below is a bit about the Maths Challenge. 

Katalina and Josephina are the co-founders of maths challenge. Initially it started in south Auckland (SAMC) for year 9 and 10 Māori and Pasifika students with an objective to increase interest in competitive maths in preparation for the regional Mathex competition.

Since starting in 2019, maths challenge has since then expanded to include central and west schools for years 9 and 10 as well as year 7 and 8 in south Auckland. This year they are looking to expand again as we all know the real fun for maths starts in primary school! So they are on the hunt for any interested parties keen to provide an opportunity for your year 5 and 6 Māori and Pasifika learners.

The competition concept is very similar to mathex where it's a team of 4 students with one student being the runner. There are 15 questions to complete in 20 minutes. 

If you are a teacher, parent or student interested to join this competition, then please contact katalina.ma@auckland.ac.nz

Check out the maths challenge in action from last week at Pt England school or click on the links below if you'd like to know more.

University of Auckland

Newshub

Tagata Pasifika

Social media - Instagram

RPI: Day 4 - Small group reading instruction

Day 4 of RPI covered small group reading instruction. Rather than putting all my notes from today dumped here on my blog, I threw it onto ChatGPT to see if it could make sense of what I had written down and I was pleasantly surprised with its sense making of my bullet points. 

Reading Apprenticeship vs Guided Reading: What’s the Difference?

Guided reading focuses on teacher-led small group instruction with texts at the students’ instructional level. We use this time to:

• Introduce word work
• Observe reading behaviors
• Provide explicit teaching points (one at a time—less is more!)
• Scaffold understanding with targeted strategies

In contrast, reading apprenticeship—especially at the high school level—is about gradually releasing responsibility so students can read and reason independently. It’s built on Pillar 2: Rich content coverage and Pillar 3: Gradual release. This approach helps students become metacognitive readers who take risks like saying, “I didn’t understand that—can someone help me?”

Both methods have their place. The key is knowing when to lead, when to guide, and when to let students take the wheel.

Teaching Students to Think Aloud and Read Strategically

Modeling is essential. A digital modeling book with these four parts can be incredibly helpful:

• Learning Intention
• Success Criteria
• Vocabulary (co-constructed with students)
• Teaching Points (e.g., identifying main ideas, understanding author’s craft)

Use screenshots of 1–2 text pages. Model how to notice key details and then let students justify ideas with evidence. Encourage students to annotate and leave digital comments to show thinking and participation in group discussions.

Vocabulary: Set Them Up for Success

Gift your students the right vocabulary. Use word cards, displays, and multiple encounters with key terms. Vocabulary is more than definitions—it's about using, seeing, and understanding words in context.

Introduce new texts by previewing vocabulary, but leave room for student exploration. Foreshadow where needed, but trust them to engage with the text using the scaffolds you’ve provided.

Observing Readers: Less Testing, More Listening

One of the most powerful teaching tools is listening to students read aloud. Have cues in place for when individual students will read, and use a recording sheet or even Google videos for playback and reflection.

• Use running record-style observation:
• Left column: What they read correctly
• Right column: Omissions, misreads, errors that affect comprehension

Avoid bombarding them with comprehension questions. Instead, listen for fluency—expression, pace, volume, smoothness—and use that to inform your next teaching move.

Student-Led Discussion: Make It Conversational

The goal is to build purposeful, peer-to-peer conversations. Everything should go back to the text. Use the oral language strand to frame ground rules for talk, and support effective questioning—both open and probing types.

• Before sending students off to read:
• Annotate together
• Set a clear purpose for reading
• Prepare background knowledge using multi-modal materials (e.g., videos, anticipation guides)

Consolidation and Follow-Up: Revisit, Don’t Reinvent

Follow-up sessions aren’t for introducing new content. They’re for:

• Rehearsing vocabulary and strategies
• Consolidating learning
• Bringing together different perspectives
• Blogging or sharing outcomes in digital spaces

This is where students truly start to own the learning, reflecting on what they’ve read and how they’ve read it.

Overall, another great workshop session to add to our kete in class. As shared in our session by our facilitators, it's not meant as extra work but rather to add to our normal class routine so that students get used to the think alouds and follow up tasks.

Formulating my Hypothesis (Hunches) Part 1

As a Kahui Ako, we're constantly making observations and forming "hunches" about what truly helps our students achieve in the classroom. Here are my hunches I've gathered from readings and PD based around reading improvement for students at a Year 7 and 8 level.

My first hunch is this: if I model my thinking process (out loud) when reading aloud, then my students will know how they could be thinking when reading a story. It's about making the invisible work of a proficient reader visible, giving them a roadmap for their own cognitive journey through a text.

Another strong hunch I've developed is that if I provide diverse text sets, then students will be more inclined to engage with the variety of reading opportunities presented. Offering a rich buffet of genres, topics, and formats ensures there's something to pique every student's interest, making reading less of a chore and more of an exploration. This came about from the Reading Intensive Practice PD I'm currently undertaking every 3 weeks.

And finally, my third hunch: if I consistently provide opportunities for students to talk about their reading with their peers, then they'll deepen their comprehension and develop a stronger sense of reading community. When students articulate their interpretations, challenge each other's ideas, and build on one another's understanding, the text truly comes alive, and their confidence as readers soars. We've been building towards this slowly over time as we try and get some 'ground rules for talk' set for our reading discussions.

In our small groups we've been sharing our hunches with each other and also giving feedback or ideas on how we can make this practical and more succinct for our learners. I appreciated my groups practical feedback and ideas as this has helped me formulate a plan of attack going forward.  

RPI: Day 3 - Text Selection

 Day 3 of RPI kicked off with Dorothy covering what reading in a digital world looks like for us teachers, as well as students. One of the parts we covered was around the use of reading apps. I am so glad Dorothy said it out loud as it needed to be said - but reading apps are NOT a substitute for instructional reading sessions with an actual teacher. Instead, by using the built in affordances provided by most of these apps, they can be used as an independent timetabled reading task. Making good use of, and sharing with students the dashboard data provided in most reading apps ensures that it also doesn't just become busy work.

One work on I took away from Dorothy's segment was to sign up to more toolkits to ensure I am making the most of the digital affordances provided by the Chromebooks in class. 

Using appropriate texts: Mirrors, Windows and Sliding doors

I had come across and been exposed to the kaupapa of ensuring students could see themselves in texts, as well as opening their world views and experiences through text, but I hadn't heard of the 'sliding doors' part. Having a diverse set of texts to choose from, ensures texts could go both ways where they could see both mirrors and windows, but also stepping in and out of the different worlds as written by Rudine Sims Bishop.

One real useful segment we covered today was the use of text sets. We had covered this last year as a team but this time I fully understood the 'why' behind each text we were choosing. I originally selected texts based purely on theme. Today we learnt about a ramp text - which was a middle ground text the whole class/group could cognitively access easily. This could be used as a springboard into the 'anchor' text which is a main/meaty text you wanted the group to focus on. From here you'd also attache a poem, video, graphic text or poster to go with to provide extra information and support the main anchor text.

I am looking forward to completing my own text set for ANZAC for week 1 of next term. I am also going to try out the Kakapo group taskboard provided in todays session on one of my groups.

CoL: Profiling - Part 1

This year, after discussions with our Senior Management Team and my team leader, I've decided to focus my inquiry on reading. This will hopefully align with what I am also learning about in the Reading Practice Intensive (RPI) being run every 3rd week.

My identified/priority learners I have chosen are: 9 students all with a current reading age of 8.5 years. 

Out of the nine, only 3 are students I had previously taught last year. The following are my priority groups responses to our reading survey results I carried out as part of our RPI course in getting to know our learners through a 'reader' lens. 

Here are a few results from the reading survey:

Here are my priority learners PAT scores:

My next blog post will have more about students reading behaviours gathered from the reading survey.

RPI: Day 2 - Know your learners as readers

 Today's RPI covered a lot! Thankfully I have been exposed to most of this through my team leader as we had a trial implementation of mahi tracker, the task board and also the spreadsheet to help keep track of our students learning.

One of the things I was reminded of was the power of our literacy cycles we had a while back. Dorothy shared and reminded us of some of the really awesome pedagogy that took place and where Learn, Create, Share originated from. This cycle was close to what I started with some 10 years ago when I first started in Manaiakalani community.

Something I've picked up from todays session would be that despite my students being lower level readers, I still need to expose them to skills and more complex texts (and text types if they are available at a lower reading level) due to what they will face in high school. I am referring to CAA - Common Assessment Activities. It will definitely be worth my time to do some backwards mapping as explained in todays session and adapt it accordingly for my 6-9 year old readers in Years 7/8.

Learning Intentions: I completed a few of my first years of teaching unpacking and studying Michael Absolum's 'Clarity in the Classroom' text. Even after all that, I still find myself struggling at times to word LI's and Success Criteria. What I took from today was to remember to remove the content from it and focus rather on the reading behaviour/strategy you want students to learn.

One take away I'll be sharing with my team would be: Aratohu Kaiako - great spread and types of questions in the 5 categories that each test will tell us. A great guide I’d never seen before. I actually need to see more about this as I had it in my note taking but didn't link the slides.

Overall, a great day of intense learning and I will definitely be using the planning sheet to link with the Phases rather than the old learning progressions.

RPI: Reading Survey Results

 As part of getting to know our students and their attitudes in reading, we conducted a survey with questions provided by our RPI course. It delves into the thinking and attitudes of our learners in relation to what they like to read and their reading habits in and out of school.

My results weren't too surprising, and still provided great insight into reading habits outside of school, and the types of books my class likes to read. Below are some graphs to highlight some of the questions students answered. 

To give some background on my students, although we are a year 7&8 class, my highest reader is currently reading at 9.5 years old. My lowest readers are at 5.6 years and I have a big chunk (10 students) reading at 8-8.5 years. 

Here are some of my findings:

- Overall, students thought they were good at reading

- This translated to students saying they actually like reading at school (I was not expecting this)

- A high majority of students 70% do not like reading in their own time

- In terms of what their teachers think about their reading capabilities, the class was split 50/50

RPI - Day 1: Reading is core

This year I am very fortunate to join a whole lot of teachers joining the Friday RPI Cohort 3. Today was day 1.

The following are some of my reflections or things I've picked up from the day. 

Acceleration! We need our students to make more than one years progress in reading, writing and maths, in order for them to cope with the curriculum as it opens up more when transitioning into high school.

One of the things we covered today was reader profile. What is the profile of a good reader? how do we gather this? and how can we unpack or address this in order to be successful readers?

What I was reminded about, and really landed with me was the slide below about Whanaungatanga - fostering connections to learners' identities.

Todays segment on professional reading will definitely be one slide deck I will revisit to familiarise myself with more of the literature out the there in order to support my knowledge and kaupapa around reading.

A digital tool I will be making more use of will be the Canva whiteboard with sticky notes. Here is one where we shared about how we gather student data about their reading interests.

I also really liked studying the Pillars of Practice and highlighting our strengths and what we could work on. I hope to revisit this at the end of our 9 days of RPI and have made more change colour to green!

Overall, I feel like I had a bit of a head start as my whole team of 5 teachers have been through RPI and as a result we have implemented many of the tasks and extended discussion tasks we looked at today.

Across Schools CoL 2025

 Talofa Educators!

For those who are new to this space, my name is Latini Ilaoa and I have been fortunate enough to be an Across Schools CoL Teacher again for 2025.

This is my 11th year teaching Year 7/8 at Pt England School. Last year, I focused my inquiry around mathematics and accelerating students in Years 7/8 in order to cope with the transition into high school.

This term, I am also picking up RPI (Reading Practice Intensive). Due to this, I am still tossing up whether to keep with Mathematics as my focus for inquiry (more so now with the new curriculum refresh), or switch to Reading to align with what I will be learning about in RPI. So far, looking at my class data this year, I'm leaning more towards acceleration in Reading as a focus for my inquiry. I'll unpack this more as I gather more testing data.

Below is my booking form with time slots I am available for on Thursdays and Fridays. Please feel free to share this with your fellow teachers and school leaders. I am more than happy to travel to you, meet online or book a room here at Pt England School.

If you have any questions, please email me: lilaoa@ptengland.school.nz

I look forward to connecting with teachers across our cluster.

Faafetai lava

Latini