Starting from a place of understanding - rewards don't work!

 Reading back over this blog, I realised I have never shared our journey into creating a school culture based on 'understanding.'   After listening to the radio segment yesterday and sharing it on my facebook page, I thought it was fitting to do a bit of a post, like many of my posts, it isn't short, but hopefully it may spark some thought, or at least give some affirmation to those on a similar journey.

Background...

Like all of our journeys,  it all started with play.  At the time when we started to plant the seeds of our future school culture, I really didn't realise how significant our play pedagogy would be, but as it turns out, like just about everything else we do, it ultimately it all does come back to play and understanding the brain.

We had already worked hard on being developmentally aware, changing this lens to developmentally sensitive and responsive.  We understood the difference of 'chronological age' and 'actual age', understood how play was crucial for children's development and were primed and ready for more learning about this.

Around 2018 we embarked on some learning about attachment.  Understanding attachment styles was a really useful start for us and helped to build our understandings about children.  As a school we also developed our understandings of restorative practice and saw this as a great approach for us.  We were also part of relationship based learning, or RBL as it was known then.

Over the next several years,  we were inspired by the work of Bruce Perry and did some 'bite sized' staff driven PLD around trauma, starting with a book study and building our own understandings.

A copy of some of the videos we watched are included in this document that guided our learning.

Bite Sized PLD 2021/22

Over this time we also attended workshops run by Kathryn Berkett and worked with Karina Schreurs at Aro Training, here in Whangārei.

We had worked really hard on our values as a school, and while we had largely moved away a rewards and punishment based environment, we totally stepped away from this and looked further to the work of Ross Greene.  His work on collaborative problem solving is excellent and this quote "Kids do well if they can" really resonated with me.

Key Learning Takeaways from Kathryn, Karina, Bruce and Ross

Understanding what is meant by read brain and green brain (watch this if you don't know what this is referring to)

This is also a great podcast to listen to, this is episode one on the stress response.

The stress response

We need to aim for attunement rather than attachment.  These children need to work with a trusted adult, going out with a person, who has no relationship is not going to help them.  Therefore it is us that need to work hard on those relationships.  This is a collective US, meaning whole school.  Teachers, TA, Office staff, caretaker...everyone.

Attuned relationship, children need an attuned adult.  A child needs at least four adults that are attuned to them and their needs.  This makes it bigger than the teacher.   

Sprinters - go from green brain to their red brain at the drop of a hat, is emotionally under six.  Intermediate classes possible have children that are emotionally 2, 3, 4.

Marathon runners, will hold onto 'big feelings' and stay in their red brain for extended periods of time.

Status, when a child is in their red brain, they will try to drop your status, this could be saying something silly, mocking, this is an attempt to grow their status, if you drop your status, it will lower this stress response.   If we react and become dysregulated ourselves based on this communication we will only serve to heighten their response.  

Keeping survival brain calm.  Some boys hate mullets - see me, acknowledge me,  belonging, show me how I belong, where do I seem myself here,  happening, tell me what is happening, warn me, don't suddenly surprise me, mana, let me have a say, activate my voice.  We can keep the survival brain calm in a classroom if we do these things.  The brain is aiming for safety, always asking "am I safe" if we use these key ideas, we can make our classroom a safe place for all children.

Build in moments of tolerable stress, where it is possible to become excited, but them self-calm.  We do this with little children, when we play games like hide and seek.  We do this with babies, where we play peek-a-boo.  Teaching all children to self-calm in these situations.  Play is the most important way for children to learn this and become emotionally resilient.  In play children will be in tolerable stress all of the time where they are trying to navigate this world.  Children know what they need to do and don't need to be directed in their play.

Devices can cause a heightened stress response, devices do not calm them, devices train the red brain.

Encouraging them to do something that will calm their red brain, must not be seen as a reward.  Punishing the red brain, will do nothing to prevent it happening it again.  Allowing them to choose an activity that will calm them, allows us to then engage with their 'green' or regulated brain afterwards.  The work we do in building a new template, needs to happen with the green brain.

We must consider how we interact with children who are dysregulated, we need to teach every child what works for them to find their calm.  It is all about building new templates for regulation strategies.

The first three years build the foundations of the brain, it is possible to rebuild this and at school this needs to be part of our core work.  If you do not have a strong foundation a programme is not going to assist the children without strong foundation, this needs to be rebuilt.  Music, dance, play, touch, movement are all great ways to do this.  Many of our youngest children need us to go back and think about how we would have helped our babies, rocking, touch, serve and return.

Children who are lacking strong foundations, are trauma impacted and stressed are emotionally six or less.  This is the most important work we can do.  Learning can not happen in the red brain, if we want our learning approaches to work, we must meet these needs first.  First see me, understand me, then teach me,

It is possible to rewire the foundation that has been built in the first three years, time repetition and calm, it is possible to teach these children to calm.

Our brain forms connections, the more repetitions, the stronger the connection, allowing the brain to form templates for everything that it sees, hears, feels.  This happens in the first three years, this is how they see the world.  A child that starts school swearing, actually knows no different.  Asking them not to, is not going to work.  We then actually need to work on building new templates.  The old template never goes away.  When they are in green brain, they will use the template we have helped them to build.  When they are in red brain, the old template kicks in, this is when we see the old 'behaviour.'  When we don't feel safe, our old template activates

We build new templates through attuned relationships, repetition, repetition, repetition.   It takes time, calm, understanding and acceptance.  

Children also have a self-belief template, such as saying things like "I am mean."  Repeating when they are in their green brain "that action was mean, but you are not mean". This takes repetition, patience and calm.  

We are not capable of thinking in our red brain, punishments do not work.  A reward based economy will only work for children that feel safe and have strong foundations.

Red brain is oppositional, selfish, aggressive, negative.  Our aim is for children to be able to activate calm quicker, but engaging with the red brain is never going to go well.  Think fight, flight, freeze.

If we watch children and over time we see children staying in their red brain for shorter times, this is proof that we are helping them build a new template.

While in their green brain, we need to allow them to share with us what they like to do when they are moving into their red brain.  Discuss it after when they are in their green brain.  Think of places outside of the classroom, it could be climbing a tree, hiding in a hut, nature is a great way to activate the green brain.  Teach children to recognise the signs that they are becoming dysregulated so that they can begin to use these strategies independently.

So, where are we at now?

The notes I have shared above are not a complete picture of everything, in fact it is an incredibly vast topic, however if we can lock onto these key understandings, we can really make a difference.

Firstly, this work really bound together what we do in approach to wellbeing, it has in fact accelerated this work forward and allowed us to tie everything together under the framework of Te Whare Tapa Whā

This work has also really helped me grow my understanding of nuerodiversity and  and impacted the strategies we use to assist these children in terms of belonging, safety and inclusion.

In fact, this work has benefited all children, it has helped us establish a school culture that is often remarked on by visitors as being calm, safe and welcoming.  People often comment on the wairua of the place.  

What we have done, is over time built on our understandings, not discarding one piece of knowledge for another, but weaving together our understandings.  We will of course, keep weaving, embedding these approaches into the very fabric of our place.  What we have not done, is leapt on a programme, we have shaped something that is right for our place and our children.

Play

The catalyst of it all.  Having a pedagogy based on play is vital to the success of our environment.  Play enables us to give children to practice their social and emotional skills.  It allows them to have mana and to regulate within situations of tolerable stress.  Play also allows us to see children, to hear them, to understand them.  Play is absolutely golden.

Whole Staff Knowledge

Something we continue to work hard on.  This is an approach that takes all of the adults in the school.  We wrap around children, understanding that we are all a part of their journey.

Te Kōhanga

Te Kōhanga, or the nest, was our take on a nurture space.  With little funds, it was impossible to build something, so we reinvented our library.  This is now a space children can take themselves to if they feel overwhelmed.  It has become a safe place for our neurodiverse children and anyone that needs it.  Over time it has shifted and changed, I am certain it will continue to do so, as our understandings change.

SEL

Social emotional learning is so vitally important, it is something that needs to be taught across the whole school.  Across our juniors, we use the little spot of feelings, which is awesome, it gives children the vocabulary to describe how they are feeling when they need to.   We also have a whole school wellbeing curriculum, with areas of focus for each term, or ideas for when problems come up.  This curriculum is based on Te Whare Tapa Whā.

Empowering Children 

Part of our wellbeing curriculum includes teaching about the brain, the red brain and green brain.  Children are taught to recognise this in themselves and others and how they need to respond.  Children are also taught about neurodiversity, so they can respond appropriately and come from a place of understanding.  Our neurodiverse children are empowered to to embrace their diversity as something that makes them special, we want them to be able to advocate for themselves.  This comes through strongly when children are talked to, one instance where our target learners were spoken to recently, a child said "sometimes I find it hard in the classroom because of I am autistic."  I consider these small comments wins.

More recently I started sharing a series of videos about neurodiversity with my wider school community, change comes from a place of understanding.

Wellbeing Teams

We have several members of staff who make up our wellbeing team.  If a child is identified as needing extra support (for whatever reason) a member of the team will be assigned as a support person.  In some instances the child may be asked who they would like, but in most cases, these staff members have already proven themselves to be attuned adults.  These children are checked in with regularly and together they problem solve and work on strategies to find solutions to what might be going on.  In some instances, it is just a chat, just someone who I can go to who cares.  In some cases, our whole staff forms the team, ensuring we see and hear that child in the playground and make a deliberate attempt to connect to build that sense of belonging.

I am part of this team and if the 'case' is seen as more complex, I will be assigned to help.  We will generally use collaborative problem solving. 

In every case, there is communication between home and school.

In parting...

I don't know if I have done a very good job of describing our journey, or where we are at.  I know I will have missed things, because there are so many parts of the puzzle.  It is a journey that never stops, next term, we are again working with Karina, she will be working with our children, our teachers and our whānau.  We are committed to deepening our understandings to help our children.  

This has been a largely self-led, self-funded journey, but an important one.  I despair at the idea of pushing outdated rewards based programmes into our schools.  Every day I hear of children being stood down and suspended at schools, because a well meaning teacher engaged with a dysregulated child in a way that heightened their response.  Often these children are our neurodiverse and it breaks my heart.

We are not perfect, that is not possible, but we are striving to do the best for our children, to understand them, to see them, to hear them.  

To be developmentally sensitive and responsive, Neuroscience informed, should be the goal of all our schools.

I will leave you with this short video featuring Ross Greene, I really recommend you getting your hands on his book "Lost At School".   This video is the first of a series, that is well worth watching!

Comprehending comprehension - a complex task indeed

Some initial thoughts...

I wanted to start this 'last' blog post around the pillars, by clearly saying although the visual represents the different components as independent, they of course are/should all taught in an interactive way.  Vocabulary, should of course be taught in the context of comprehension and as I have added to the bottom of the pillars, rests on a bed of oral language (expressive and receptive) and background knowledge.

I would not want anyone to think that we would teach these components as seperate and it is also important to understand that comprehension is one of the most complicated things we do on a daily basis and it does not only happen in the context of reading.  Narrowly focusing on reading, as it is presented in the visual, is not useful to anyone.

I have taken this straight from the transcript of the podcast I have linked to this post.

"Comprehension is not a skill that you can learn how to do it and then apply it to different contexts, because it depends upon what you're reading, what the purpose of reading is. I've used the example. It's not like swimming, where you learn how to swim and then you can swim in any body of order. It's heavily dependent upon what it is you're reading and the purpose of that reading. And that's why I and others are beginning to argue that it's best taught within a meaningful context that in school involves learning or appreciating literature, understanding about how stories are told and what's involved in poetry or whatever it might mean. It's a meaningful context that where comprehension is best taught.
But by treating this comprehension the focus is on understanding for the purpose of learning or for the purpose of enjoyment, appreciation, whatever it might be there, and then alphabetics and fluency would still be taught. 
 I think it's more important to think about what the goal is of the instruction and in one case, the goal is going to be understanding how the alphabetic principle works and how to become more efficient at using that principle so that kids can learn to read more words, can be more fluent in their reading and then, with comprehension, focus on the purpose of the comprehension activity."

Hugh Catts

I am not going to even attempt to claim any expertise when it comes to comprehension.

 I have read a lot, listened to a lot and there have been some common ideas coming from what I have engaged with, that have shaped how I 'enact' the comprehension pillar in my classroom (again, not a fan of the pillar visual.). In essence, I am still trying to comprehend, comprehension.

I guess the reason I have separated the areas out in the way I have done in this blog post series, is to show what each component looks like for me and spark some thinking about how it looks for you.  

I have found that the gift the 'Science of Reading' as a body of research has given to me, is the deliberate lens I apply to everything I do in my classroom now, that why, how and what have become so incredibly important to my practice.  

I also say, that this is what it currently looks like, because everything evolves, we learn more, we do better, we tweak, we change, we base what we do on the needs of our class.  To do this however, it is crucial we have the understanding ourselves first.  

I have quite a few blog post topics spinning around in my head at the moment, so don't want to go into any great detail about teacher knowledge, but I will say, that I hold great fears around the current speed we are implementing programmes, without knowledge, in my opinion, we are setting ourselves up for failure.  If we place such a huge importance on developing the background knowledge of our children, should we not prioritise our own as well?

The gift my learning journey has given me, is time to understand, apply, change, learn more, tweak, learn more, change...over and over again.   I would like all teachers to have that same gift.

More about that another time.   However I will say, what I do in a classroom, is dependent on the needs in front of me and how I know best (right now) to respond to these needs, what I am doing for the class I have now, is quite different at times from what I did last year and the year before that.  Not only because I know far more each year, but because the children in front of me have different needs.

Comprehension...the point of this post.

Firstly let me say, that from the reading and listening I have done, I think that the five pillars visual, although it is helpful to show the facets that make up our approach to teaching reading, doesn't serve to represent the process as effectively as it could.  

Because the pillars are represented in the way they are, they look independent of one another, what we know is this is not the case, that they are interwoven.  To me I wonder if a better representation would be of a weaving, with alphabetics and fluency woven through comprehension.  I am thinking of the way flax is woven, each strand important, but reliant on the other to stay together.

As the pillars are all the same size, it also appears that they carry the same weight, of course, we know that at different times, we will be needing to give different weights to each area, when a child is learning to read, decoding and the learning of the code, will be vitally important and therefore is likely to carry much more weight in the first few years. 

I don't sum this up very well, but it is summed up really well by Hugh Catts in this 16 minute podcast here with Melissa and Lori, it is well worth a listen.

High Catts - The five pillars

A bit straight out of one of my old blog posts...

Comprehension...this is a massive area, and there is currently a big problem with how the majority of teachers interpret comprehension.  If you are anything like me, you had come to think of comprehension of something that happened at the conclusion of reading...a product of the reading so to speak.  Summed up, comprehension could be labelled as the questions you ask at the end of the text, that largely rely on what existing knowledge about the topic the reader had when they started reading.

You'd probably also been under the understanding that comprehension is a skill that can be taught, but finding a main idea and summarising are strategies that will look different according to the text.  

That led me to the work of Hugh Catts, who among many other well known experts of comprehension speaks about the value and role of knowledge.  The need to tell children what they need to know, to stop all the pre-knowledge activities.  He goes on to talk about the fact that knowledge gives us a place to put incoming information and that reading then allows us to add to or modify our existing knowledge.  It is our knowledge that helps us to organise and inference.  I love the way he says that reading comprehension is thinking with a book in your hand. 

Hugh Catts also says it is not possible to think critically unless you have knowledge about something.  He advocates strongly (as do many others) for teachers to give background knowledge before reading, so that children have a place to tie the new details on to, it is important we understand our working memory is overwhelmed by too many details. (which is possibly what I am doing to you via this post.)

Hugh Catts says popping comprehension amongst the pillars in the way that it is presented above has led us to think it needs to be measured, remediated or instructed in the same way as the others and this has led to teacher misunderstanding.  It has also led to a lot of classroom learning tasks that do very little to increase comprehension skills.

The problem here is that our system largely embraces 'discovery' over knowledge.  

In fact I sit in an interesting world, where I actively advocate for play, which innately is based on discovery, but then am here saying, yep I also believe in building knowledge, and in in explicit teaching.  

The crux of the problem here is that we think there are two camps and that we can't be in both.  In reality we can and should be in both camps...each has a very well deserved place in every classroom.  In my opinion magic and science combine to make deep learning.

In fact in our space it is the curiosity that is palpable through play that often feeds the knowledge and vice versa, I see a very symbiotic relationship here.

Tim Shanahan says - Education should both nurture curiosity and provide the means to fulfil it – increasing what kids know about science and social studies (and literature and the arts, too.)

I have learned so much about comprehension over this holidays, too much to put it all here, and a lot of it, is swimming around in my mind, trying to find some knowledge to attach itself too, but what I do know is that in the majority of our schools there is a lack of understanding of the Science and that is a problem.

I have tied this learning strongly to what I had already learned about schema and the building of knowledge and vocab in a classroom.  It has certainly given me loads of ideas!

Hugh Catts Podcast 

This podcast with Anne Lucas discusses micro-skills and it is a must listen in my opinion.  It will change how you think about comprehension

Anne Lucas Podcast

Quotes from Anne "The more tools we give to kids to grapple with texts and concepts, the better they’ll be able to do it.”

“Background knowledge is incredibly important and is something that we need to integrate into instruction and curriculum.”

And back to now...

So if we understand that comprehension is not a set of skills that we can teach, but instead strategies, then what are these strategies?

Seven comprehension strategies - reading rockets

I like this summary and found it really useful.

I think the most important part is that we know comprehension is developed in the context of the text and is also very reliant on the background knowledge and vocabulary that they bring to that text.

So, what does this actually look like in my class right now?

I apologise for my very long winded way of getting to the actual point of this post. 

How do I encourage my children to make sense and meaning while they read...in essence to comprehend?

I teach a year one and two class, they are still largely learning the code, learning to decode and working on developing their fluency.  In these terms I very much dedicate a lot of our time here, because it is incredibly hard to comprehend a text if you can not read it.  

This visual image demonstrates how important the foundations, leading into fluency, assist with being able to comprehend whilst reading.  

1) Sentence level comprehension

- I use my 'character' texts here.  These are texts, that are 70-80% decodable for the majority of my class.  I have blogged a little about these in several blog posts.  Here are a couple if you are interested.

https://numberagents.blogspot.com/2023/07/dramatically-different-meets-explicit.html

https://numberagents.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-unintentional-impact-of-my-class.html

We read these stories in parts.  Children read, we then read together and buddy read.  The sentences give us a chance to discuss what is happening, in some cases infer and apply what we know in context, they are also written in a way that require some form of prediction.  We summarise what is happening together and children will ask and answer questions.  Children will then go away and demonstrate their understanding of the days sentence, by drawing a picture to go with the text.  The pictures below show some examples of how their pictures express their understanding.

Children are constantly coming up with new characters and new adventures for these characters and delight when they see these added into our next stories.

2) Play

We work through a pedagogy based on play.  Comprehension is naturally developed through talk, children share their wonderings, their interests and we explore these together, they ask and answer questions and share their ideas.  These are all important foundations of comprehension.  Of course these situations are great for vocabulary development and an important link to the development of background knowledge.

3)Read Alouds and Storytelling

As children are still learning to decode and build fluency, a lot of our comprehension is developed through read alouds.  These read alouds can take the form of a chapter book, a non-fiction text, a fairy tale, a quality picture book or a shared text.  These are used deliberately to focus on using comprehension strategies in the context of the text.  To look at those micro-skills that Anne discussed in her podcast, to develop vocabulary and knowledge.

I also use storytelling in my class, sharing my own stories, so children can think about similar experiences they may have had and tell their own stories, this obviously has a strong link to writing.  I always start these stories with "Have I ever told you about the time....."

Puppets occasionally make an appearance here too.

Dramatic inquiry is woven through some of the picture books we read, and this is a super powerful way of building contextual understanding, of course when we start our 'portal maths' this imagined world opens up a whole new experience.

4)Knowledge building

Really this is woven through everything that we do, but I do use our knowledge spine, that is woven togtether with our SEL curriculum and our reading spine, to layer knowledge.

Kaurihohore Knowledge and Reading Spine. (As always this is a work in progress.)

I will look at the knowledge we are deliberately trying to develop, pick a range of texts, videos and podcasts and go from there.  Layering this knowledge, building vocabulary and linking to new areas of knowledge.  Children will draw understandings, respond in written form, writing facts about a topic, we will generate questions, answer questions, summarise understandings.  This is a process that works really well for us.

Whatever knowledge we are developing, I will weave it into our reading and our writing, with strong links obviously to other curriculum areas.

5)Language and Listening Comprehension

I intend to blog a little more about this in time, but the fact is, all over our country, children are entering school with skills in expressive and receptive language that are far below where they used to be.  Obviously this is a massive area of discussion, COVID had a role to play, but sadly this was happening long before COVID, as the declining oral language levels was what launched my journey into play over ten years ago.

It is incredibly hard to work on reading comprehension if this is an area of struggle.  

So we spend a lot of time on this, in all the ways listed above.  I don't lower my expectations, we listen to podcasts, we listen to chapter books, we discuss quite complex scientific concepts, but the amount of scaffolding I do has increased.  I share my thinking out loud, I model what I am doing when I am thinking about a topic, I break our learning into bite sized amounts and more importantly, we regularly review and revisit what we have been discussing, making explicit connections to new areas of learning.  We also use pictures a lot, looking at a picture, talking about what we can see and notice, inferring what could be going on. What could have just happened?  What might happen next?  Children generate questions and answer questions, they then write sentences from this picture.  We do the same using silent animations.  These are incredibly powerful for developing comprehension overall.  

Over the past two years I have been learning more about language struggles and about DLD (developmental, language disorder) which is said to be as prevalent as dyslexia.  It is something we know little about, but when it comes to assisting our children with literacy, it is crucial we start catching up.

And so this brings me to the end of my little series on the pillars.  I hope that there have been some ideas that have sparked some thought.  This of course is not the end, it is but the beginning, I share, not because I perceive that I am an expert, but because I think sharing is the most powerful thing our profession can do.

Cracking the code - phonemic awareness, phonics, encoding and spelling - what we are missing

 

This is the next instalment in blog posts around the 'pillars of literacy' and unpacking what this looks like in a real classroom.

If you have read any of my posts, you will know I am a massive advocate for whole class teaching.  When I say whole class teaching, what I mean is quality tier one teaching for the whole class, done together, without groups.

Obviously I still work with groups or individuals as needed, but this is much more fluid and dependent on the exact need at the time.

This blog post touches on the code, the teaching of phonics, encoding (taking the sound to print) and spelling, learning the rules and applying them.

In the past (before I developed an understanding of a scope and sequence) I did of course teach phonics, in fact we did a bit of everything, it was all very balanced.  While we did our best, I can see why this pick n mix approach, with little thought of the why and the what, did many of our children little favour.   I did a lot of 'stuff' because that was what you do, often there was very little understanding of the why.  

Don't get me wrong, many children did flourish, they became readers and writers (not necessarily spellers) and went on to do very, very well.  

However it is not them that I refined my practice for, it is the group of children that struggled to get going, the children that started and never stopped spelling saw as sor, or who never moved past the dreaded 'magenta', it is those children that I have worked so hard to reshape my practice for.

This is not about 'Structured Literacy' it is not about 'the Science of Reading' it really isn't even about the 'Science of Learning' this is about a teacher being able to use research informed practice and being given the time and space to do so.

Firstly I want to start with the end of this blog post title - what are we missing?

Well, I actually think we are missing a massive part of the puzzle, which makes this blog post even more relevant right now.  We are so desperate to turn around reading results, to leap on board with 'one stop programmes' that we are missing the role that spelling has to play in the improvement of reading. 

In turn, this means we are totally missing the boat on writing.  Encoding, the recording of the graphemes that represent the sounds that we hear, has a massive role to play in the improvement of reading. 

 There is a lot to read and listen to about this, I particularly like the work of Lyn Stone.

It really makes sense doesn't it?  If you can spell it, then you have mapped it, therefore this assists you to read it.   Along with this, if you are developing fluency in your spelling, ultimately this will have a massive impact on your writing as working memory will be freed up to concentrate on the other 'stuff.'  I have a blog post on writing, if it is of any interest.

Everything I see focuses on reading, will this ultimately mean that writing will become the new 'red flag.?'  Will it mean we madly dash about to find programmes to fix our dismal writing levels?

 Children who are good readers are not necessarily good spellers, I am sure as teachers, we see this first hand, every day.  I know my own children were great readers, natural readers, seemingly not needing to be taught, but boy oh boy I wish I had known about the importance of explicitly teaching encoding skills and spelling patterns back then, because spelling is not their strong point.   

This is not really just about turning out great readers, it is about ensuring children are capable in all areas of literacy.

So, back to the point...

What does it look like in my class?

Well, we follow the LLLL scope and sequence, I say we, because this is a school wide thing.  We flow from that into the code.  We teach the sounds explicitly as we go, largely using a sound to print methodology.  

As part of my whole class sessions, we do daily review, included in this review are the sounds we are working on committing to long term memory, the ones we largely have nailed, will disappear from the slideshow over time, the ones remaining are those that we need repeated practice of.  From time to time, the embedded sounds will return, just to make sure everyone is still on track with this.  I incorporate phonemic awareness into this, but largely not in the dark (without letters) it is done largely with print and I find this works really well.

Initially in my Year 1 and 2 class, our slideshow may focus on 2-3 new sounds.  This is largely because they usually have them already and it is really just a refresher.  Featuring strongly from week to week are the short vowel sounds, which I generally introduce all at once, but will focus on the ones that are easily confused, such as 'e' and 'i'.   Why all at once?  Well because in most cases, they have already been working with ones that feature in stage one and two and once we have all of our short vowels, we can spell and read so many more words.

We go through our review sounds at the beginning, then get to our new sound/s.  By the time we have worked our way through to stage 4+ it is time to start focusing on some 'spelling rules' as well.  Some weeks there are no new sounds, I may have noticed a common misunderstanding that I really want to hammer and the focuses is then on that.

If we are up to the flossy sounds in stage 4+ I will include all of them in the slide, in fact they often appear long before we start to learn the spelling rule, children read these sounds quite naturally, they make sense, there is not a need to spend time focusing on each one.  

When we get to our new sound pattern, we will focus on learning it, learning how to articulate that sound, how our mouth is shaped, words that start with that sound.  We will then focus on encoding that pattern, practicing it, by recording it.  If there is a rule attached, like the floss rule, we will then learn that rule and spend some time practicing spelling words that follow this pattern.

When we are spelling our sounds, we will also work on reviewing those we have recently learned and word chaining, along with a dictated sentence will feature strongly here.  Children benefit from lots of practice applying what they have learned.

Obviously we also work on word reading and use our connected text, but a lot of time is spent on the recording.

You will note that I have mentioned encoding and spelling in the blog post title, this is because I see encoding as learning to record the graphemes that represent the sounds, but spelling is about recording the spelling patterns and obviously spelling can represent sound, but it can also represent meaning.  Lyn Stone explains this all much better than I.

I do spend a bit of time learning the spelling rules with my class, for many, these are a real lifesaver.  Simply knowing that english words can not end in the letter v, is empowering for children as they venture into becoming writers.

This is where I divert a little from the sequence...

So, while I do follow a scope and sequence and explicitly teach in this way (I do love UFLI for the format) I also take detours from time to time.  The character texts that we use in our 'decodable' class stories contain parts of the code that have not yet come up in our whole class sequence of teaching.  For instance, we are up to 'ck' but have taught 'ee' 'sh' 'ch' and the vowel sounds of 'y'.  We have also touched on some of the other long vowel representations and the 'ng' sound at the end of words.  

I have read a range of views on this, but. have found from my experience that there is a lot of benefit from teaching outside of the sequence, when children are meeting these patterns in the context of what they are reading.  Last year I found children did a lot of 'self teaching' once they got through the initial code (stage 4) and there ended up (reading wise) being a lot they cottoned onto by themselves.  This does not mean that I don't again teach these explicitly when we get to them in our sequence, but I do not shy away from including a few of these patterns in the character stories I write.

I guess this is where not having a 'programme' but having a personal 'why' and a commitment to always increasing my understanding and knowledge comes in. 

 I can be guided by my children and there needs and act in an informed way.

Informed, purposeful practice.

From faltering to fluent

"To read at reasonable pace, with good accuracy and appropriate expression"

Fluency is not about reading as fast as you can.

-----

When I set out on my 'structured literacy' journey, it may as well have been called 'structured reading.'  At the time, I saw it as a change to how I taught reading, replacing this (what I was doing) with that (what I would do informed by the research.)

Don't get me wrong, it did make a massive impact straight away and it was a huge journey, but I was looking to replace my practice with a neat bow and it simply doesn't work like that.

We changed to a scope and sequence, we became much more explicit and the books we were using became decodable, but despite the changes, I knew I was missing the boat, there had to be more to the Science than this.  

And so, I did another deep dive, I have reflected a lot about that deep dive (of which I am currently on) through this blog and in particular this recent series around literacy.

I dived deeper into understanding the pillars and have come to think that comprehension should be that roof on top, as well as part of the process....but that is for another post.

That dive has taken me into many areas, many of which I have posted about, but today I wanted to reflect on fluency, what it means to me and how I am deliberately providing for fluency development in my classroom.

When it comes to fluency, I am a massive fan of the work of Tim Rasinski and also really like what Nathaniel Hansford has to say on fluency as well particularly around the use of repeated reading.

I enjoy the work of Nathaniel as he brings a very skeptical and scientific lens to approaches, which is always useful.  This article is interesting.

https://www.timrasinski.com/presentations/Reading-Fluency-and-the-Science-of-Reading.pdf

Tim Rasinski has appeared on a number of podcasts and is always interesting to listen to.

From what I have learned about fluency, I think it has a place in our classrooms, being increasingly important as children move to being efficient decoders.  My class are beginning readers being Year 1 and 2 (working from stage 1 - stage 7.2)  therefore fluency activities don't have a major role in our day, but I do intentionally work on fluency in a number of ways.

So how does it look in my class?

Repeated Reading and Performance

We do this in two ways.  Firstly we work on this through oral language, similar to a talk for writing approach.  We have a featured poem, which we learn line by line, in choral fashion.  Not only does this allow us to work on the clarity of what we are saying, it allows me to model expression and performance, which is part of fluency.  As children learn the text, usually 10 - 15 lines long, but could be shorter or longer, I increase the amount we practice at a time.  Woven into this we do quick oral comprehension activities, quickly drawing the parts of the text in sequence, asking children to remember as many key parts of the text as they can and draw them, whatever works with the text.   We also spend time making up questions from the text and retelling it in a variety of ways.

The beauty of this, is it can be done in the pockets of time you have during the day.

Once children can recall it fluently, they practice in pairs or groups, then we will perform it together.  As appropriate I will give the children their own copy of the text, to read it as we perform.  They will also take it home to practice.

There are so many benefits to doing this and it is always beneficial for children to hear how a text sounds being read fluently and then to be able to do this themselves.  I always try to link the text in with our current knowledge development, so that it can also contribute to our growth in vocab.  Over the term we would probably learn three to four texts in this way, but maybe less if the texts are long.  Poems are perfect for this as are nursery rhymes.

To conclude a text we will perform it for an audience, or video it for seesaw.

There is obviously a very strong link to writing here, as children can innovate on the text by writing their own versions.

Just Right For Me Reading

Nothing flashy here, basically it is just time spent reading.  After our handwriting every day, children sit down to read three texts that are just right for them.  I teach them how to work this out, but basically the books are like baby bears porridge.  They must not be too hard, they must not be too easy, they must be just right.  If children have to really work at sounding out more than three words on a page (really work means sound out loud, so you can hear it) then the book is probably too hard.   (don't get me wrong there is a real place for reading easy books to build fluency and they also love to do this.)

They simply sit and read, out loud, but not too loud.  With a buddy, or not with a buddy, they just read.  They usually sit for ten minutes minimum to do this and it gives me time to go around and listen to what they are reading and how they are reading.  They then pick one, two or three of these books to take home and practice in the same way.

Just right for me reading time

Our Decodable Texts

I have blogged about these before, but these are the character texts that we read as part of our whole class literacy.  These texts are broken into three parts, so that by the time children have the whole texts, they have repeated the first part three times and the second part twice.  

We read the text on the screen together.  Children then read the text themselves or to a buddy.  We then read again together and I will read at the end to model how it sounds with expression.

Children always illustrate these, as the texts are used for sentence level comprehension as well, however I find they have had a very positive impact on their fluent reading.  Possibly because they are getting a lot of practice at accurate word reading and loads of repeated reading with many opportunities to map words that can then become sight words.

An example of one of our character texts.

Word Ladders

I got this idea from Tim Rasinski, basically it is a list of words that children read from the bottom to the top and then back from the top to the bottom.  I always ensure the words follow a pattern that we are learning.   These are repeated over the week and help to build accurate word reading.  I also use them for spelling as the children LOVE to test their buddy.

Fluency Sentences

Just as simple as it sounds, a bunch of similar sentences,  but punctuated differently.  For example:

The horse is big.

Is the horse big?

The horse is big!

Children work on reading these with expression.

Or they could look like this

WOW, look at that!

Wow, LOOK at that!

Wow, look at THAT!

Children work out what word to put the emphasis on.

These are fun activities taken from the Mega Book of Fluency which Tim Rasinski co-authored.

I have noticed really great progress this year so far.  My fluency sentence assessments, showed children have all improved at least two stages and their automatic word reading has dramatically improved.  

Fluency is just a tiny part of my literacy programme, but for a tiny part, it packs a big punch!

I really like Tim Rasinski's analogy of fluency being like a bridge to comprehension and made this quick little visual up to represent those ideas.

Writing - there's more to it than meets the eye

 In my little series about literacy, I thought I would meander off a little into the topic of writing.   

Writing and reading are inextricably linked, while there are obvious differences, there are many pieces of the puzzle that are the same.  Sadly however, writing seems to be completely misunderstood and it is not yet widely acknowledged in our education system, that writing is one of the most complex cognitive tasks that we ask children to do.

I have posted about writing before, a few years ago now, and reading back, there was much I did understand, but a lot I realise I just didn't know.  Since then, my deep dive into the Science of Literacy and more accurately in my mind, the Science of Learning or Evidenced Based Teaching, my approach to writing has changed.   

Often writing is seen as just one part of the daily timetable, the teacher models, the children write and that is it.  Little thought is given to the foundations that need to be in place for children to be successful in this process.  Or if thought is given, an attempt is made to teach it all at once, through one modelling session.  I know this was me, I scheduled writing, I wrote, the children helped me, then they wrote.  Often they just drew a picture and scribbled some letters and this was ok.  I celebrated the effort, I cherished the storytelling but if I did give thought to what else I should have been fostering, it was shoved in with everything else. 

 I was also really good at 'motivating' their writing, we used drama, imagination...all the bells and whistles.  

Many children made excellent progress within this approach, they picked up what I was putting down and quickly became writers.  Others appeared to remain stalled, mystified by the process of writing, often unable to come up with their own ideas, yet I persisted with my approach, thinking if we just kept plugging away at it, they would get it.  I wrote with children every day and hoped that the frequency of writing throughout the week would mean progress.  As I write this, it reminds me of the current government's soundbite "an hour of writing a day."  

What we did find, school wide, is that there were a group of children, that never really became writers.  This happened year after year.   

They improved slowly with time, but were often termed 'reluctant', writing was just not their thing, their spelling was atrocious and their writing was messy.  They disliked writing as much as I dislike soggy brussel sprouts.  Still we blamed the fact that this was just the norm, some children would just never take to writing and that was ok.   Funnily enough they were predominantly boys and it was around year 4 we really noticed them significantly lagging behind their female counterparts.   Our summation was that boys really just didn't like writing and therefore we needed to come up with engaging and authentic contexts to write about.   So instead of looking at what actually makes up the writing process, we tried to make it more exciting.  Again, this really worked well for those children who were already successful writers and those who were our 'reluctant' writers really loved the 'excitement' of the motivation, but there was little impact on the quality of their writing.  They were happier to write, but this didn't make them any better at it.

I look back now, appalled at my mindset, but forgive myself for not knowing better.  I am a firm believer in the fact that if we know better, we should do better, so over the last seven years I have committed myself to knowing better and to looking at my practice when children are not achieving as I would expect.

What I know 'better' now, is that writing is incredibly complex.  While many would say, we get better at writing, by writing and therefore children should be writing everyday in order to improve, I say, that if we are just doing the same thing, over and over and expecting different results, we are deluded.  Of course repeated practice is crucial, but what is it that we are repeatedly practicing?

So in my 'knowing better' journey, I have discovered that writing has so many facets, many that can be linked to reading, many that stand alone and many that actually benefit reading.

What I am about to list, is obviously not a complete list of all the parts of the writing puzzle, but I think they are the ones that we need to actively be teaching and fostering in our classrooms.  Using this thinking, it is likely, rather than one 'writing session' you will be teaching the foundations or building blocks of writing over the day in bite sized chunks, bringing these things together for sessions where children do write independently, but the 'modelling' sessions may not look like they used to.

I have not gone into great depth in any area, as I don't want this post to bore you, rather I would like it to either be affirming, or give further food for thought.

I preface this all by saying, this works beautifully in a classroom following a play pedagogy and the very nature of play, will foster and develop many of the areas I list.

1) Working Memory.

This is often completely overlooked when people think of writing, but if I am unable to keep an idea in my head, long enough to plan or write my story, how do I actually write it?  

More significantly, if I am cognitively overloaded by having to concentrate on some of the other areas listed, I simply don't have the cognitive bandwidth to keep my idea in my head.  

Now, there is research to say working memory can not be improved and other research that says it can be improved.  Whichever is true, I think the most important thing we can do, so that a child can keep an idea in their head long enough to get it written down, is free up the load other tasks are placing on them.  As Anita Archer would say, teach the stuff and cut the fluff.

2) Formation

This has been ground breaking for me.  I knew handwriting was important, but didn't really think of the role it played in writing.  Seems silly to say this now, but I didn't see it as actually part of my writing approach. 

Being able to automatically form little shapes leads to fluency (accurate and at an appropriate speed.) By automatic, I mean, they appear not to even have to think about it.   This very obviously frees up cognitive space to concentrate on the other skills that writing requires.  This means, that handwriting sessions are integral to writing and need to be part of an everyday programme. 

If we look at my discussion around our reluctant writings, this is possibly one of the core skill deficits  that led to their supposed 'reluctance.'

I also love this Anita Archer quote "If you expect it, pre-correct it."  This is so relevant to letter formation for our youngest learners.  As teachers of our youngest learners, we already know what it is they will struggle with and what habits they will form, if we allow them time to do so.

3) Fine Motor and Gross Motor Skills

This links in strongly with formation, as it is basically impossible to learn to form letter shapes correctly, if holding a pencil and sitting upright is a challenge.  

Children need core strength for handwriting, coordination and balance, they need to know where they are in space, to have the hand strength necessary to ensure holding a pencil is not an overly difficult task.  This is a massive area and I won't list all of the things a child is having to put together movement wise in order to write, but we do need to give the credit deserved to the complexity of this process.

So although it might not sound like part of a writing session, this is part of it and an awareness of fostering these movement skills is vital.  Again, where a play pedagogy comes in very, very handy!

The Key Strengths & physical skills needed for handwriting:

Gross Motor Skills (Posture Base)
Gross Motor Skills (Bilateral Coordination)
Fine Motor Skills (Sensory Perception)
Fine Motor Skills (Hand and Finger Muscles)
Eye Tracking Ability.
Spatial Awareness.
Motor Memory.
Visual Memory.

4) Encoding (spelling)

This is an area I massively overlooked when I thought of writing sessions.  Encoding now takes prime of place in our whole class literacy sessions (decoding, formation and spelling combined.)

Providing encoding practice that is based on a scope and sequence and taught systematically is vital.  I am not talking about good old word lists that get sent home, supposedly memorised and tested on a Friday.  I am talking about explicit teaching of encoding, based on sound to print, focusing on parts of the code being learned, where children are adding, deleting and substituting sounds.    I am talking about the spelling of specific sound patterns that are being learned, with repeated practice, to the point of automaticity.  I am talking about retrieval practice and interleaved practice, where parts of the code that have been taught, are woven into new learning and revisited again over time.

Why is this important, well the less children have to deliberately think about how to spell each word, the more they will be free to write well developed pieces, unhampered by poor spelling understandings.  If they have  many spelling understandings under their belt, and know how to spell many words, they will also be more willing to add interesting words into their writing that they may not yet be able to spell.

When I think about our 'reluctant' boys, this was an integral reason they were reluctant, spelling the words was just so incredibly hard.

Dictated sentences, based on the parts of the code we have learned and are learning have become a regular part of my practice, these are also gold for teaching children what a sentence is and what it needs to have.

You have a go at writing a sentence in a language that you have basic understanding and see how complex and creative your sentence is.

5) Irregular Words

Again, linked strongly to reading, but the spelling of irregular words is vital to building fluency of writing.  Words like (the, my, was, saw) are words that we come across so many times in the sentences we want to write.  If each time, we have to think about how to spell them, that is cognitive bandwidth taken away from the writing process.  

Many irregular words will only be irregular, till children have that part of the code and are learned exactly the same way as we teach regular words.  

6) Oral Language and Vocabulary

Oral language forms a huge part of our approach to writing.  A trend at the moment is a real decline in oral language.  This downward slide of oral language has been something I have noticed over the last 12 years and it is only getting worse.

If a child can not speak in a full sentence, how an earth do we expect them to write one.   We need to be providing explicit opportunities to develop oral language, to concentrate on the clear articulation of sounds, to hear wonderful language through poetry and rich texts if we want our children to be capable writers.   Children need to be exposed to rich vocabulary and develop a rich vocabulary bank of their own.

Again, there is a massive link to reading here and the development of a knowledge rich curriculum.

7) Sentence Construction

Explicit teaching of what a complete sentence is, is a vital part of the writing programme.  Children need to be systematically taught the parts of a sentence, learning about syntax and morphology.  I think I noticed the most dramatic progress in my classes writing when I became more explicit in teaching them about complete sentences.  It seems so simple, but is incredibly powerful.   I love Colourful Semantics for this, combined with the Syntax Project.

8) Idea Generation and Knowledge Development

If coming up with an idea is hard, how an earth do I write?  If I have very little understanding of my world, how do I write, what do I write?  

Coming up with an idea can be explicitly modelled, using pictures, songs, poems, videos etc  Children need to be taught how to do this. 

 When it comes to knowledge, our classrooms need to be places where knowledge about the world and connected schemas are actively developed.   I found the writing of factual pieces, based on the knowledge we had been learning, really assisted my classes progress with writing.  Because they had the knowledge, having something to write about was easy and creating connected ideas, even easier.  This focus on knowledge also brings in many Scientific understandings, which is an added bonus in a time poor classroom.

This post is just a very basic look at the facets that go into an approach to teaching writing effectively. 

 I share a lot of my practice through my facebook group Number Agents, if you are keen to see more or ask any questions. 

I am always learning and I think that that is one of the most important dispositions a teacher can have.  

 Writing is a massive area and far more complex than it appears on the surface.    

There is much more to writing than meets the eye.

The Science of Literacy - Knowledge Development

 

I thought I would do a bit of a series of posts (as I get time of course) about the aspects of Science of Literacy and how they are enacted in my classroom.  

I still see far too much of an emphasis on the Science of Reading being just phonics, there seems to still be very little understanding of what is actually encompassed in this term and the research behind this.  We are all so fearful of using the word 'balanced' we steer clear of this term, just in case people think we are talking balanced literacy.

If you look at the very well known pillars of literacy above, you'll see there is far more to all of this than just phonics.  However if you listen to researchers discuss the above visual, you will hear them say that the pillars above are misleading, seeming to apply that the same weight be applied to each.  This was not the intention of the diagram, and it is important to understand, for children to become readers and writers, there does need to be a higher degree of emphasis on phonics and phonemic awareness (with letters) in the beginning, for children to become fluent.  In a recent podcast series on Melissa and Lori love Literacy, Hugh Catts discusses specifically this.

Obviously over time, the degree of weight applied for each pillar, changes.  There is also the important point to make that while there are key elements of comprehension that need to be taught and fostered through practice, comprehension should be the outcome of all reading and the old adage, learning to read and reading to learn, should be thrown out with the bathwater as it is misleading and infers that we can't learn to comprehend, while we are learning to read.  Obviously comprehension is something always being fostered, if not through children actually reading themselves, by rich picture books and other texts.  

I have popped oral language and knowledge along the bottom of the pillars, as they are so foundational and if you are anything like us, the oral language level of children coming in to school and the deficit in knowledge about the world are becoming quite alarming.

The other misconception about the pillars, as Hugh Catts has discussed is the fact the pillars appear to stand alone as if they are independent, this of course is not the fact and they develop together, being complementary of each other.  I guess this is where the reading rope is a really useful model, along with Active View of Reading (Nell Duke). 

This could be discussed at length, but what I really wanted to share, is how I ensure an approach that fosters each of these aspects, with an appropriate emphasis on what my children actually need.  I have a class of older Year One children mixed with predominantly Year Two (NZ) So they are 5 - 7 years of age.

Importantly it is necessary to note that my journey has led me to view the interwoven nature of reading and writing and therefore this is how I approach it in my classroom.  

Knowledge Development In My Classroom

Operating through a play based pedagogy, means this is something that happens quite naturally in terms of what is child led.  Tuning into the focus of their play, what they are exploring and featuring this in our discussions, highlighting this in our reflective journals and finding connected texts, videos and podcasts drives this easily.  It is something I have always done, but actually never thought about how it directly impacted progress in literacy.  Now I am deliberately thinking about it, it is easy to tie it into our writing and my modelled texts, along with any problems presented in mathematics.

However, once I started to focus on how we build knowledge, I knew I needed to go beyond this, there were so many areas that their play just wouldn't lead us to.  In a curriculum that is so overloaded as it is, it seemed very logical to pull this in through areas such as Science, SEL, Social Sciences, Drama, Arts etc.  

While this does happen quite naturally, I have learned to be more deliberate, to really tune into the knowledge and expand on it in different ways, to link it and interweave it, to listen to podcasts, to watch related videos, to use storytelling, to read about it and write about it.  Even more importantly, to record it in some way, in turn connecting it to our vocabulary development.

Another thing I have learned, is not to take for granted, what children do and do not know and not to waste a lot of time gathering 'prior knowledge.'  Most powerfully I make sure we connect writing to whatever knowledge we are deliberately developing and try to draw explicit connections to aspects of knowledge, where it is relevant.   If children are not yet able to write about it themselves, then they assist me to write about it.

Something we are working on at our place is this knowledge and reading spine, it is only a couple of years old and still a work in process, but it is our attempt to pull everything together and make it easier to 'fit everything in.'

Reading and Knowledge Spine

When building knowledge on a topic or idea I generally follow this rhythm:

*Knowledge presented through play, or deliberately by me

*Create some word storms around the topic or idea that can be added to over time and used for writing ( I have shared some examples of these in my group)

*Read some fiction books around the topic

*Read some non-fiction books around the topic

*Watch some short videos on the topic and listen to some podcasts if relevant

*Practical activities if relevant to the topic

*If able to, provide items in the environment that will encourage further thought through play

*If possible, find connected texts that the children can read, or access as a read together

*If able to, I write some decodable texts to go with our topic or idea.

*If appropriate I will use storytelling and dramatic inquiry that are connected to our knowledge.

*Focus our writing on the topic or idea

- Throughout the process, record our ideas and journey to reflect back on.

The above process may be quick, or it may extend over several weeks.  As much as possible, I allow children to guide it and generally we will start to wander off into connected areas.

There is obviously a massive link here to how we explicitly foucs on Vocabulary and I will focus on that a bit more in my next blog post.