May Testing 2019

First testing round of the year has just been completed and most students performed as I would have expected. we've worked very hard on our reading over the last 10 weeks. High volume of texts, read tos, listen tos, dictations, writing, over load of text. The boys have all done a great job to work on their individualised goals and to keep up the effort every single day.
Starting term 2 we changed round some groups as students had made significant gains and others needed the individualised support being offered in my space. - So my data for May has some gaps compared to February.
The 4 identified target boys have made some good gains in their reading levels but still remain significantly behind where they should be. The three higher students (J, L, N) are reading in the same group and are presenting with decoding issues around looking beyond the initial letter of a word and to always ensure that the text they read makes sense. For term 2 I am concentrating the boys on word families and noticing detail. Betsy Sewell's program - Agility with Sound offers so much that these boys need.
The focus from her program will be on phonics and becoming fluent in reading a range of 3 letter word families - such as tin, pin, bin, sin, kin. The simple idea is that if the children can become confident with the medial vowel, they can apply the sounds they've learnt to decoding more complex words.  At the moment the boys tend to change the sound of the vowel to make a word that they are familiar with instead of what they see.
To run the whole program would mean spending all day on reading strategies - so as all teachers do - we are taking a small portion to try ad make significant difference.

The lower student (A) is only in year 3 and has increased his number of sight words and is confident when supported at yellow. He is needing to learn to apply strategies he is learning to independently decode. He tends to say any word that he is confident with - regardless of initial letter or meaning. So I have put him back in a beginning yellow group to solidify letter sounds as well as re build his confidence with the sight words he knows but can forget.

The challenge that this group is providing me is one I am thoroughly enjoying - to need to plan and prepare so many individualised programs keeps me busy and thinking around what will make the difference that these boys need.

Cubetto

We have very recently received a Cubetto coding robot in class. The premise is that the children are given a narrative about a little robot and the challenge is to decode it on its journey through Cubetto Land.

My favourite thing about this tool is that there are no screens. The children code the movements by using coloured tiles.

Today I got out Cubetto for a group of 25 year 3/4 students. Together they had to come up with directions to move Cubetto from one spot on the mat to another. If a group could orally indicate their plan, then they got a chance to code with the tiles. On all occasions the route was challenging enough that the groups needed to assist each other to de bug their code. All groups worked collaboratively and, being a new tool in class, the engagement was high.

My next plan is to build a series of narratives around Cubetto, that exist in a shared space so that many classes have the ability to access a narrative and see if they can code and perhaps de bug Cubetto's journey.

Cubetto is certainly a tool for younger primary, but I am seeing the benefits in language development, justification and discussion as well as all 5 Key Competencies in middle primary.