BT Literacy Course (Writing - Teacher Inquiry Ideas)

Effective Writing Practice

Teaching Inquiry Inspiration:
Accelerated Learning in Literacy (ALL)

- Jump start for students who are behind (Introducing the writing topic for the week prior to teaching it to the whole class - enables and encourages ALL group to share ideas with the whole class.
- Daily preloading with a core group of students, getting the topics for them and the whole class.
- Modelling book - begin everyday with a cut up sentence (Brain storms of words they might be able to use, sentence starters), students sit together and use the modelling book.

- Introduce the writing topic for the next day
- Weekly focus
-  POBBLE - story starters, writing from other students, new picture everyday.
- Inspiration or influenced by the picture and for them to write about it. 

Criteria for ALL
- 1P writer they needed to make accelerated growth in their learning.
- Looking at students who are just below.
- Open up an Inquiry for what is going to make a difference for those students.

Whole Class
- Knowing your learners and teaching as a whole class, not teaching in groups as 

Teaching sentence structure
- Punctuation is being taught through sentence starters because they know what sort of sentence they should be writing and they know there should be a full stop at the end.
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 Using Rich Literature for Writing.

- Taking from other Authors tool boxes. Identify in reading and use the authors intent in their own writing.
- The power of 3 - Using that rhetorical question
- Notice it, Name it, Identify it - Choose a section of a story with visual language and ask children to draw the
- Give text to children and ask them to highlight all the features the author has used in the text. We don't know why, but we can make assumptions.
- Character study. Use a picture to describe the picture in relation to the text we have read. How can we add or make assumptions in character studies. How do we activate our prior knowledge to make assumptions about stories.
- Show sentences. What do they notice? What do we know by reading just this sentence, what assumptions does this cause us to make? Tell me all the things they notice about that sentence. Noticings cannot be wrong. Use the modeled sentence to make another sentence, identify what we could change in the sentence to change the context.

Power Writing 

Visualization - Giving children one word or a visual (In their head) to then have 1 minute to write about.
- Ask children what they thought about when they were writing (This teaches you a lot about your writers).
- Children learn that all writers/writing is different dependent on the authors experiences.
- Creates critical thinking.

Oral Language

Freeze Frames
- Find a you tube video and make a freeze frame, then together as a class ask them to put the sequence of the whole video together. Pull out the language/vocabulary. (Maybe they call an eagles 'feet' claws or feet, what are they really called?).

Useful Links
Teaching Inquiry: http://success-for-boys.tki.org.nz/Teaching-learning-resources/Story-Starters Pictures, story starter, ideas, examples of student work.
Literacy shed - Writing sheds, so many writing topics using videos etc. Ideas and suggestions for writing including sentence starters.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3qCoCkzjTNcLVpQeExpZnM1MkE/view?ts=5b298bdd 

BT Literacy Course (Reading)

BT Course - Effective Literacy Practice (Reading)

Reading like a reader (storyteller)
Reading like a writer

Reading strategies

What strategies do you use to read? Do all children have these strategies?

- Sounding out
- Looking for familiarity - act out words that students may not know the meaning to (confused, act confused) so that they have a visual to connect to the word.
- Prior knowledge - What do they already know which will help them to predict what they might be reading.
- Reading on
- Re-reading
- Peer support - Teach strategies to children that may not be reading strategies, but strategies that will help them to read and learn.
- Listening
- Reading out loud
- Inferencing - Show don't tell  (Inferencing activities online - reading and writing).
- I want to feel the water between my toes, the sand on my skin (I want to go to the beach).

What do good readers do?
A lot of the time students do not know what they are reading or why? They are not getting meaning from the text? 

While we are reading we are;
- Decoding
- Read with fluency and accuracy
- Have a method for understanding vocab and context.
- Understand continuous (Sentence level, within a paragraph, between paragraphs).
- Understand non continuous texts (Photographs and captions, diagrams, speech bubbles - What is the assumption we can make from the pictures?).
- How is this piece of text relevant for this child? (Including running records, probe etc).
- Retelling, ask students to retell as they are readings, do not be satisfied with their answer keep asking questions and this will give a better evidence of what the child is actually understanding.

Poetry - How would you teach it?

- Build curiosity and imagination
Pull apart the poem, the moon was but a chin of gold. What is the poet saying? Is the poet talking about a moon?
- Illustrate the poem, how would this poem look like as a picture?
- Teaching metaphors and similes (Language features)
- Text structure
- Language structure, does the main noun being used need to be used? Could this be something else?
- Science - Teaching about the phases of the moon, relate to Matariki, if you can put everything together (coordinates) you can save time.
- Expression, Tone, Voice.
- Punctuation (What does this bring to the text).
- Art/Visualization
- Personification

How do I know what to teach?
- Tests/assessments (Use sometimes)
- Observations (Use often)
- Learning conversations (Use most) - metacognitive (thinking about thinking)