Term 3-Reflection

Class has 18 children. Most have settled into classroom routines and good learning is happening with most of the children. A few of the children have some behavioural issues mainly around manners, respect and honesty. It is hoped that these children can be part of the Pastoral Care programme during the term. We will also continue with our values programme with this term's topic focussing on honesty.

Reading
All but 3 of the class have moved beyond the emergent reading level. These 3 are some of the younger children in the class but there are gaps in their letter sound knowledge that need to be addressed, perhaps through work with a TA. One of these 3 has better letter sound and word knowledge than the others and will be ready to move onto L3 shortly. The other 2 children will need to be monitored and targeted for extra assistance when they move into Y 1 next year.
Other children are working at L4/L5-6/L8/L10. All are developing their word knowledge and starting to use letter sound knowledge as a strategy for solving unknown words. Some work needs to be done on monitoring and self correcting, fluency and for some children increasing their comprehension of their reading.
Of the children who have completed 1 year at school 1 will not achieve the NS. He will be 3-4 levels below and will be a prime candidate for Reading Recovery next year.

Writing
All but 3 of the class are able to write at least one sentence independently. One of these children is nearly at this stage and just needs some encouragement and support to make the move. The other 2 need help due to their low knowledge of letter sounds and high frequency words. 
Some children have problems retaining their ideas when writing and the use of talking tins may help this and I will be getting some of these this term to help these children.
Other areas that need some work with some children include finger spacing, punctuation, and expanding their ideas. These will be the focus of our shared writing sessions.

Term 1 - A Reflection

Term 1 started with a class of 8 New Entrant children and by the end there were 10. Not huge growth in numbers but it made for a good start. The remainder of my class will start in Term 2, mostly during May. Overall the children's  learning has progressed well, partly because of lower class numbers and partly due to their ability and attitude.

Literacy:
All but one of the children have good letter sound knowledge and they are starting to use this well in their writing and reading to help write and read unknown words. The same children have also begun to develop their knowledge of high frequency words. Apart from the one child all are reading at level 2 or 3 which is a good achievement for the short time some of them have had at school. The one child who is not making the same progress is having some difficulty learning letter names and sounds but has begun to learn some of the high frequency words. When reading he needs to focus carefully if he is read accurately. At present he is working daily in an early litetracy group. Early in the next term I will need to look at his learning and explore other ways to improve his progress. As for the rest of the class the focus will be not only on extending phonological and word knowledge but also on beginning to developing word solving and monitoring skills as well as greater understanding of what they read. 
Nost of the children are writing one or two sentences independently using known words and their letter sound knowledge. Most use spacing and some punctuation. The main focus for these children in term 2 will be on developing their ideas, exploring different ways of beginning their writing, extending the vocabularly they use and being focussed on the content/ideas in their writing.

Maths:
Most aprt from one child have a good knowledge of number to 10 easily and on to 20 and beyond. The one child who doesn't is not consistent counting 1-1 and does not know all the numbers to 10. Once again with this boy I will need to look at ways of improving this early in the term. The main numeracy focus in term2 now that their basic number knowledge is sound is to explore addition and subtraction. There are some in the class who have shown very good numeracy skills and these children will also need to be catered for.

Incoming Children:
Pre school visitors have been attending every Friday. Looking at some of the preliminary observations and how they work shows there may be some challenges here learning and behaviour wise. Most are coming from the same kindergarten and we have maintained a close relationship with them this term which hopefully helps the transition to school for these children.

PLN

As teachers we need to take more responsibility for our own Professional Development over and above that which is school directed and provided. This is where we need to develop our own Personal Learning Network.

A PLN consists of the people, places, and things that help you learn. These can be web based, print based or the network of people we interact with in our teaching and learning environment. This creates an active personal learning network.

A good overview on what makes a good PLN can be seen here.

My PLN

There are other components I could add to this such as Professional Organisations, Mentors and Newsletters/Publications that I could subscribe to. This is a start however.

E-Portfolios

After a year of working and sometimes struggling with MyPortfolio I was less then happy with how it was working for the rest of the staff and me. Concerns I had included the lack of entries and the lack of response to people's posts. While I could see the value of MyPortfolio it presented difficulties for our staff in that it was not an easy format to get to grips with and this led to some frustration and in turn put people off. A survey I conducted at the end of last year with the staff confirmed this. To counter this I've explored various options and feel using the new version of Blogger with it's ability to create pages may be a better and simpler option. Teachers have also had experience already with Blogger as the platform for their class blogs.

Once set up we can then assign buddys to each teacher and have them providing quality feedback on the posts which will mostly cover our work in Literacy.

Another facit of e-portfolios is the ability of teachers to reflect on their learning and work in the classroom-often we feel we have nothing to say. This is something we could also work on and could be a good workshop for our upcoming mini ICT conference.