Curiosity is the fuel for discovery, Inquiry and Learning-Teaching as Inquiry

 I have had the great opportunity to do a Teaching as Inquiry assignment as part of my University papers at Auckland University. As part of the assignment we had to choose a curriculum area that we wanted to accelerate 3 children in for their learning. I chose to do writing, as writing is one of my passions. I used this passion to be able to connect with the children and help them to accelerate in their writing.

I chose 3 children who are at a year 5-6 year level and are WELL BELOW in their writing in all of  the  writing elements. They are currently at Level 1 of the national standards when they should be at Level 3 by the end of the year.

Below I have  included my lesson outline as well as photos from the day.

WALT: We are learning to use a flowchart to help us plan our ideas for our writing.

Success Criteria: I know I can do this when I can:

• Use what I know to write down my ideas.
• List keywords that link to the photos.
• I can peer/share my ideas about what is happening in the picture with my peer.
• I can re-read my story to make sure that it makes  sense.

Resources:

• WALT and Success Criteria printed out for children’s reference.
• Pictures printed off from the butterfly cycle.
• Calendar paper for children to do their pieces of writing on and also to brain storm.
• Felt tips available for the children.

Key competencies:

1. Thinking: Students who are competent thinkers and problem solvers actively seek, use, and create knowledge. They reflect on their own learning, draw on personal knowledge and intuitions, ask questions, and challenge the basis of assumptions and perceptions. (Derived from New Zealand Curriculum pg 12)
2. Participating and contributing- Students will be peer/sharing their ideas with each other as well as sharing their stories with each other.  Actively participating in a group context. Through participating students have  a sense of belonging and know that their ideas are valued. Their self Mana is enhanced.

Effective Pedagogy:

• Creating a supportive learning environment: “Students learn best when they feel accepted, when they enjoy positive relationships with their fellow students and teachers, and when they are able to be active, visible members of the learning community. Effective teachers foster positive relationships within environments that are caring, inclusive, nondiscriminatory, and cohesive. They also build good relationships with the wider school community, working with parents and caregivers as key partners who have unique knowledge of their children and countless opportunities to advance their children’s learning”. (New Zealand Curriculum, Page 34)This will be shown when children’s achievements are valued as well as celebrated. When children are able to be active participant in the learning process where they can share their ideas with their peers with confidence. This will be encouraged by the teacher and praise will always be given.
• Making connections with prior learning and experiences: “Students learn best when they are able to integrate new learning with what they already understand. When teachers deliberately build on what their students know and have experienced, they maximise the use of learning time, anticipate students’ learning needs, and avoid unnecessary duplication of content” (New Zealand Curriculum, pg 34)-This is done when teacher gets children to make connections with their prior knowledge on butterflies and the butterfly cycle. This is also linked to their reading text that they have read.

Guided writing is an opportunity for the teacher to work intensively with a small group of students who share similar learning needs.The students, sitting with the teacher, construct their texts individually in their own draft books. The teacher supports them closely in finding the best way to meet their learning goal.Children have the opportunity to share their writing with each other. Such sharing helps students to discover how well they are meeting the purpose. The students learn from one another as well as from the teacher, seeking, offering, and responding to feedback as they think, talk, and write their way through the task. The teacher is able to monitor the progress of every student.(Derived from Literacy Online, TKI)

Learning Sequence:

1. T goes through the WALT and Success Criteria with the children.
2. Teacher gets children to share ideas about what they know about the butterfly cycle-Making connections and accessing prior knowledge.
3. Teacher then shows children the first picture: What can you tell me about what is happening in this first picture? Talk to your buddy about what is happening?
4. Write down all the key word that you know about the picture in your mind map.
5. T gets children to think of how they can start their stories- if they are having difficulty she gives them a starter prompt.
6. Children they write about the first picture. (These pictures are already stuck in on the children’s calendar paper before hand)
7. They they then move onto talking about what happens in the 2nd picture and repeat same process as above.
8. If children are having difficulty she uses prompting-always making sure children are in the zone of proximal development.
9. At the end children read through their stories and make sure that it makes sense and correct what they need to correct.
10. T makes sure that she is always encouraging children to write their ideas down-all that is in their minds onto paper and always giving praise to the children.

        

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

Reflection/Student voice:

1. What can you tell me about what you learnt today?
2. Do you think you have checked all the boxes in our success criteria?
3. What do you need more help on?
4. How could I help you
5. Do you think that if someone reads your story it will be interesting? How could you make it more interesting.

I really felt my lesson went really well and I got really good positive feedback from my Literacy Expert that came into observe me as well as positive feedback from teachers at my school which was really nice.  The writing topic that I chose for the children was linked to the text that that have read during reading lessons on the "Butterfly Cycle". My next steps in extending the children would be exposing the children to more academic language/vocabulary, that they can use to add those extra details in their writing. 

The children were really engaged in the learning and were in the Zone of proximal development. I really enjoyed this lesson with the children and they too enjoyed the lesson.  

Here is a photo of me using the Success Criteria as a marking matrix where I got the children to self access themselves and check weather they thought they had met the success criteria at the end of our writing lesson. I visually ticked it off in front if the children so that they could see this. 

Here is an example of the of my students pieces of work. To begin with I have made sure before my lesson I had my resources all set up and avalible so that time was not wasted during learning time. I had set up all the pictures on the piece of paper for the children before the teaching session. Here you can see that the photos were used to scaffold the children's thinking and for the children to also make connections with the pictures as they had read a read a text about the butterfly cycle. Beside the pictures children were asked to write down all the key words that they could think of relating to the picture. An example is: egg, leaf, shell etc. The children did this for all the pictures.

The children then used their key words to help them with their writing Here is a photo example of one of the children's work. To help them with starting their writing I gave them a sentence starter. I was there to guide them and support them but all the learning came from them.


The children really had fun and they were really engaged in the learning process. I was very pleased and proud of how much the children have grown in their learning and how well they engaged in that "Zone of proximal development" so that optimised teaching was able to be achieved.

You can click here to view my video on my teaching.









GTS 1,2,3,4,5,6,7.