Number Agents: Dramatically Different Meets The Explicit

My journey over the last few years has been about weaving all I know about play, playful/artful teaching and explicit instruction following the science of learning in literacy and maths. I absolutely do not claim to be an expert and acknowledge that this is an ongoing (and I suspect always will be) journey for me.

One thing I have become very clear about is that it is not a this or that. It is not play vs explicit teaching, it is not learning through the arts or learning in a structured way. It is not about having high academic expectations vs wanting children to be happy.

What is very clear is that this is about the science of learning, understanding how children learn, how the brain works, how children develop and building our approach to fit in with what research is showing us. What I am also very clear about is that acceleration (hate that word) of learning is not possible without strong foundations and building those foundations is crucially important. What I am also very clear about is that we are in a mental health crisis in our country and providing for children's wellbeing needs to be hugely important to us.

I am not a drama expert by a long shot, but it was learning about Mantle of the Expert via Viv Aitken that shaped much of what I do now.

Through this approach I learned about, and have kept close to my heart the role of intrigue. What we learn from a state of intrigue, we remember, along with this, what we emotionally connect with, we also remember deeply. Of course this alone is not enough and that is where the explicit, repeated practice comes in...the emotional connection/intrigue helps that velcro for new learning to attach to, to be extra sticky!

If a goal of our teaching is to allow children to commit knowledge to their long term memory in order to free up bandwidth so that they are better able to work with problems in front of them and to build schemas like velcro to attach new learning to, then surely we must consider how we use intrigue and emotional connection.

So, long story short, this year in literacy, I have had a big focus on sentence level comprehension, fluency and vocabulary development as that is an area I really wanted to improve on. I have posted about this if you want to catch up on my journey prior to this post. Before you ask, yes all of these things are part of a structured literacy approach, a big part of it!

Amongst a range of things has been creating my own decodable texts, based on a cast of characters that the children have come to know and love. Now, when I say decodable, I have to add that they are about 60-70% decodable based on the code that we have developed, sometimes higher. Within these texts are spelling patterns that children may not have encountered, that I will either take time to explicitly teach, or simply tell them. So perhaps they can't be called decodable, but they are definitely accessible for all of my children.

What I had not prepared myself for, was the LOVE the children would develop for these characters (starting with Ned and Bob, with the children's help I have gradually added to the team of friends over time.) It is quite extraordinary just how deeply children have connected with the characters and how eager they have been to come up with ideas for the next adventure. These characters and their adventures, belong to my children.

Over three days, I introduce a new part of the story. We look deeply at the very simple ideas being introduced and work on the sentences to the point of fluency (remember prosody is an important part of this.) By the end of the week, children will have the complete story to take home and read with a high degree of independence.

Our characters - children have helped me come up with their names and the adventures they may have.

Ned - a fat cat (short vowel d)

Bob - red pig (short vowel, b)

Zag - little green frog (short vowel, z, adjacent consonants)

Zig - fox (short vowel, z)

Buzz - a bee (short vowel, floss rule and ee)

Fluff the chick - (short vowel, consonant blend, floss rule, digraph ch, ck)

Children love these characters so much, that they often feature in their independent writing, because they see the patterns over and over again they often remember them easily. For example, we have not looked at /ee/ in our scope and sequence yet, but children have it nailed. There are also many digraphs we have covered in the stories we have been reading, that I have noticed children learn more quickly than I would expect. These patterns have started to appear in their independent writing too, which is great.

Anyway, back to the point of my post.

This holidays I was lucky enough to attend a course with Tim Taylor and Viv Aitken, this course was based on their new book, which includes a set of keys that can very quickly be used to weave drama into the learning.

Now what I already know about incorporating drama, is that children relate to the learning in a whole different way, often remembering the nuances, that you yourself will forget. You can read about my rabbit adventure in this blog :)

So I want to use a few of these keys to add an extra dimension to my decodable stories. I think by quickly bringing the character to life via a key, will add to the comprehension children have for the story. I am excited to see how it goes. I also think it will add to their writing and ability to expand on their sentences.

It is going to be interesting to see how it goes and of course it depends on me becoming comfortable with the keys too. I think this will be an easy way to grow my practice.

So on Monday, I will occupy a chair and act out a series of actions, in the role of Bob (they will not initially know this) just before he comes up with the idea to go for a stroll to the park.

Children will discuss 'his' actions, what he is doing and what they think these actions are telling us. They will then get to listen to a snippet of what he is thinking or doing.

Using the 'show not tell' philosophy and see how they may relate to the sentence in a different way.

Below is the story we will be working with week one. Looking forward to see how it goes. As you can see, it is very simple.