Visit To Parkvale School

Prior to going to Longworth Forest we went to visit Parkvale School.  Linda Cheer has worked with some of the staff at Parkvale School so we went to observe Cheryl England and Gail Kelly and see how their programme/environment worked. We then went to see how this looked further up the school.

One key factor in the ladies room was that the children kept on playing for quite a while after the bell went.  The children could go and choose anything around the room. We were also looking at Modern Learning environments and talked to Nicky, the DP who said that they didn't have a lot of money at the time of their alterations so they only bought the whiteboard tops and put them on their existing tables.  I could see a real advantage with having one of these tops at my kidney shaped teaching table so after talking to Stephen I emailed Furnware for a price.
We saw writing which is an intensive programme with a number of teacher aides coming in to help in the class.  They have undergone a lot of work with Murray Gadd.  Things that impacted on me were

• the sense of having a moveable display board board with goals etc for literacthat children chose their own writing goals now though at the beginning of the year the teacher did this
• a must- do board of activities
• the furniture including tables with whiteboard tops
• the time dedicated to play at the beginning of the day,
• WIP Work in Progress Signs
• incorporating all the groups's goals in her story modelling book.

Visit to Longworth Forest School

Longworth Forest is situated on a 1.6 hectare lifestyle block boasting a forest of 250 trees. It is run by Linda Cheer, a teacher with 30 years teaching experience, who believes in play based learning. Three days a week, a group of keen learners, clad in gumboots, discover, explore and play in The Forest. Assisted Discovery Learning is part of daily life. The school is limited to 6 children who are 5 or 6 years old.  You can read about her school at Longworth Forest Weekly blog and her personal journey at Linda's Journey

See also the article in the latest gazette  Education Through Play 

For me I can see benefits in play based learning although the Longworth School is not practical for us as there are only 6 children.  We can however make more use of our "forest" up on top field.  I definitely think that children coming from ECE need to have more play in their day.  At South we are now running discovery days  fortnightly which is more often than in the past.  We have changed the format of these so they are not as organised as they used to be, allowing the children to be self managing. These mornings certainly focus on the key competencies.   

Christine Braid - Foundations for Literacy

Key Points:

Phonemic and Phonological awareness- starts with hearing syllables in words then onset rime, then phonemes (hardest). 

• Dyslexic children have trouble with the phoneme level.   
• Children need to learn their letters, words and print concepts.
• Vocab - the larger a child's vocab,  the more likely they are to be a good reader and vocab helps them to understand the story.
• Interactive Read Alouds - analytic talk - good to read books across a theme.
• Use of picture books to teach inferring. Given suggested titles and demonstrated how to do this
• Good to read books across common theme to build up vocab. -currently doing this with books around Rugby stories
• Suggested that we read the story book three times.

Whanau Week

This week we had a Whanau Week when we gave our parents the chance to come in and observe what their children are doing in class.

Incredible Years For Teachers

This year the New entrant teacher and myself are attending the Incredible Years for Teachers Programme which aims to support teachers to confidently manage the challenging behaviours some children exhibit in the classroom environment and to increase children’s social, emotional and academic skills. Mary Chudleigh is my group leader for the duration of the course and has visited me regularly.