Teaching or testing ?

Teachers ask their students questions constantly BUT do we teach the answer first?
We are aware that our student are struggling with language acquisition , so do we spend enough time teaching the concepts and vocabulary.

Think about your class programme and the questions you are asking - have you given input first?
Are you aware there is a questioning hierarchy 

Here are some ideas from a recent training session with our speech language therapist at Sommerville Gail.

Levels of Questioning. Blank's Levels of Questioning.

The Six Levels of Questioning

Pre Writing skills

When developing early skills for writing students need to be able  form the following lines in order to be able form letter correctly.  Our student develop the skills to form these lines and shapes at different ages (chart above is an indicator) as they develop fine motor control, in hand strength and motor planning skills.

Motor planning can affect a child's handwriting in many different ways: 

• figuring out how to hold the pencil and how to put it to paper
• planning the layout of work on the page and carrying it out
• establishing the motor memory of remembering how letters are formed
• carrying over the memory from one task to the next

It is important our students get the opportunity to develop in-hand manipulations skills and hand strength so they can write and carry out regular classroom activities eg cutting, gluing etc.

Sometime student have difficulty carry out writing and fine motor tasks because the have poor core strength. 

Inquiry Focus for 2018

 I have selected the following CoL achievement challenge:

#5 Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/key competency using language symbols and texts.

Questions

Will using fine-grained assessments improve teacher capacity for setting appropriate goals for students who fail to register on standardised tests?

This year I hope to get into more Manaiakalani classrooms and support teachers with assessment of students with additional needs. Then planning appropriate goals and programmes to support the students learning.

Please book time with me if you would like help with a student.

This year my personal learning focus will be to continue to develop my skills and knowledge around language acquisition and how we can support students who have communications difficulties. This was a very common challenge for our students identified by many of my COL colleagues in 2017.

I hope to share my Inquiry and my learning journey with my blog posts.

Please feel free to ask questions and let me know what you would like more information on.

Creating classroom Rules

 Establishing classroom rules and routines are very important at the beginning of the year.
We need to make sure our student understands the concepts of the rules and the language used.
The language concepts of DON'T is a challenging one for many of our students.
It is a negative language concept. Refer to the chart below to the see the language concepts student need to understand

Give our students rules and routines that show them what you want them to do.