Gretchen's learning

Our school report showed out school norm tracks below national norm, though it starts fairly close to the national norm at Year 3 the gap then widens. It's important to note we have students sitting above the norm and that these students need to be catered well for also - how are we extending these students to ensure they make further progress over their year. Some areas that are 'hot spots' for Years 4-6 are fractions, statistics and place value.  It's important the students are offered opportunities to work with materials and have maths problems presented to them in relevant contexts to them. We talked about the numeracy project books   which are a valuable resource, but maybe we're sticking to book 5 and not using the other resources.  I will take a stocktake of our books and ensure each room has the appropriate books here. Another thing we talked about was the importance of critical thinking and the students being able to solve word problems and also recogni...

Having the opportunity to teach Reading Recovery again has been great. My training tutor, Robyn Dillon, was good at reminding us about 'slow learning' and this is something I value about having 30 minutes to focus on one child's learning during Reading Recovery lessons. The structures of Reading Recovery help me order my thoughts and focus my teaching. There's also the expectation that we go deep into Marie Clay's texts and discuss our practice - which our OPD sessions are for. Apparently Auckland has the highest rate of referred students from Reading Recovery - these are students who do not complete RR successfully and are referred on to services such as an RT Lit.  A goal from the tutors is to decrease the rate of referred students. Our focus for today's session was how we can get more information during the observation survey when children are scoring very low.  The message here was to use emergent Ready to Read (level 2) for early running records. Old ...