I'm still hanging in...

If anybody ever suggests working full time whilst trying to study full time, the only correct response should be to laugh. Don't do it! I've been doing it for nearly two weeks and I'm insanely tired. Still reasonably productive, but overwhelmingly tired. *sigh* Thank goodness for today's inter-school professional development day that allow the part of my brain necessary for monitoring and engaging with 27 children to switch off for a few hours! (Don't slam me: I fully intend to engage with the adults at the PD day... They just aren't as 'needy' as most kiddos!) Double bonus when I don't need to be there until 1.5hrs after I usually arrive at school! Anyway, I've been wanting to blog about some of the challenges and successes I've experienced since starting this contract but you know... Tired.

I thought, however, that I'd take a few minutes out of that extra 1.5hrs this morning to share a photo. It represents a big 'win' for me with this class. It's a super challenging class behaviourally and I spent a large part of the first week trying to establish a class culture that was safe enough to enable us to move forward into meaningful learning. It was hard. Very hard. Probably the hardest I've ever found a class, but you know me: it's my kinda class!  We've come a VERY long way in a VERY short time and I'm so proud of the progress we've all made. I'll share more about it later, when I'm not so tired, or feeling stressed about final essays, case studies and whatnot for uni.

NF Text Features Anchor Chart by Markeeta Roe is licensed under a
  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work here.

This week we've been reviewing non-fiction text features so that next week we can dive right into learning about top level text structures.  We're also learning about Ancient Greece so I've used a simple NF text about that as our 'mentor' text. After much discussion, a super simple anchor chart was created. There are no other student (or teacher) created anchor charts in the classroom, so I wasn't sure how this would be received. I shouldn't have worried: they LOVED it. Our next bite of the cherry saw every single student referring to it at least once, and many of them thanking me.  I love the way anchor charts reinforce learning and encoding. Yay!

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers:

Standard 1 Know the students and how they learn

Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it

Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments

International Day of Chocolate Bite II

I already told you about how my real life obsession with love of chocolate rolled over into my classroom on International Day of Chocolate right? Well, I didn't tell you about the part that most excited me. I piggy backed on the back of that new knowledge to model the construction of an information text. (OK, so I'm way too easily excited and probably should seek help with that but just go with me for a moment here.)

Not a lot else to share about it really. The class provided me with the information and I modeled the construction of the text being explicit about the features I was choosing and the linguistic choices I was making. We then went through the text and labelled the features we've been discussing. At the end we pulled out another information text they had already labelled and reflected on other choices I could have made.

This was such a powerful lesson. Everyone was engaged, everyone contributed, everyone was laughing. (We know that we learn better when we're happy so laughter's a good sign for these kinds of lessons I think!) The reflection was the most powerful part: the students gave carefully considered answers and really examined the text. They LOVED pointing out the ways my text could be improved. (You can see in the photo where we've suggested where those features might be included if we were to rewrite this text.)

This particular activity (modeled construction) is an important part of the plan that my co-teacher and I created for this unit of work.  Our unit is based on the ideas in the Literacy for Learning framework which was created along the lines of the Australian Curriculum's view that language is social and culturally constructed. Modeled construction considers the importance of the social view of language and scaffolds the students' future independent construction by demonstrating the thinking processes and metalanguage needed.  

So there we have it... What might have originally been viewed (certainly by my husband) as an indulgent exercise turned into some pretty amazing teaching and learning.   Tell me about your experiences like this.

(Oh... And please excuse my AWFUL handwriting!)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1.2 Understand how students learn 

Standard 2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area

Standard 2.2 Content selection and organisation 
Standard 2.5 Literacy & numeracy strategies
Standard 3.2 Plan, structure and sequence learning programs 

International Day of Chocolate Bite I

One of the first things my students ever learn about me  - because I tell them - is that I LOVE chocolate. All that other good stuff about classroom management and teaching philosophy can wait. So long as we're all clear on the importance of chocolate, reading, geocaching, laughing and quirky fonts then we're good to go.

So, it was in this context that last Thursday one of my students piped up with the magic words,

"It's International Day of Chocolate tomorrow!"

So. It. Is. And my mind  raced off trying to include chocolate in a meaningful way into my plan (because although, in my mind, any inclusion of chocolate is meaningful apparently the people who wrote our curriculum aren't on the same page as me on that front).

Here's how I turned an average Friday into an awesome day of chocolate-y goodness. (Well, that's a slight exaggeration but let's just run with it for now OK?

We started the day with a problematised situation (a la Ann Baker about whom I've written here and here)  about how we might share a certain number of boxes of chocolates. We talked through the problem as a class and then the students moved off to discuss their strategies in pairs before settling down to work on the problem individually. I was really pleased to see the variety of strategies the children used to approach the problem. The reflection session demonstrated some very creative mathematical thinking.

We spent some time in the library later in the morning and several of the students found books about chocolate. We're focussing on information texts during our literacy blocks at the moment so it was wonderful to see so many students spontaneously identifying features and comparing information text formats. (Yay for transferring knowledge across the curriculum!) I asked one group to choose a couple for me to borrow; they made good choices of books with a variety of information text formats.

Later in the day I used these books as the basis for a class discussion about the history of chocolate and the processes involved from cacao tree to shop shelf. My class knows that I have family in a cacao growing area so once they'd heard a little about the history and process they had a whole flurry of questions I had no idea how to answer to really think about. (To be completely honest, the extent of my personal experience with cacao fruit involves sucking the fruit clean from the beans before tossing them over the side of the ute tray I was riding on as we drove home from the farm.)  

Anyway, our conversation lead to the inevitable comparison of types of chocolate. We discussed the reason that the substance formerly known as white chocolate is not actually, nor ever was, chocolate. Love it though you may (for reasons I simply do NOT understand) it is not chocolate.  

And finally, of course, we had a taste test. Oh. My. Goodness.  I've never seen such eager anticipation for two tiny squares of chocolate. I handed each student  one square of both milk and 75% cocoa dark chocolate and guided them through a tasting process. We talked about the kinds of words that we were using to describe the taste and mouth feel after which some of the boys had  a rather heated competition to create the most interesting noun group about chocolate. 

I confess that during our reward time at the end of the day one small group of girls scoffed two entire family sized blocks of chocolate and went a little crazy. They weren't overly silly, rather more entertaining. I spoke with their parents and apologised profusely but nobody seemed too concerned and in most cases were really curious about what we'd learnt about chocolate. Phew! 

My husband claims that I was 'using' the concept of International Day of Chocolate to justify my obsession but even if that's true... We all had fun and I was able to link it to our current areas of learning so ha! Chocolate rocks! (Stay tuned for how I extended these links the following Monday.)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...

Standard 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities

Standard 2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area

Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies

Standard 3.3 Use teaching strategies

Standard 3.4 Select and use resources 

Standard 4.1 Support student participation

Standard 4.2 Manage classroom activities

Standard 7.3 Engage with parents/carers

Chocolate must be good... Look at how many professional standards I can link to off the back of a rather spontaneously 'thrown together the night before' kind of day based on it!