Gretchen's learning

 Some take outs from phonics training with Yolanda Soryl. This was an excellent course, packed with information and all you need to get started teaching a quality, effective phonics programme. -data showing students' accelerated development of phonemic awareness skills as a result of being taught phonics in first year of school - especially for boys, ELL students, Māori, Pasifika, students from lower socio economic backgrounds and people with learning and literacy difficulties. (p7 of manual). -students need an 'integrated literacy programme' that includes handwriting, spelling and oral language. And it is important hearing our students read aloud (including older students) -'teachers who taught sounding out and blending explicitly accelerated reading attainment' (p10). I noticed doing recent GKR phonemic awareness tests that none of the group of 5.6 y students I'm working with could tell me f-u-n was fun. They are not able to blend and this is a skill required ...

Play Move Improve -  Notes from webinar: Before learning to read we need to build the foundation for reading. visual tracking - mirror tracking starts from birth. ie when holding baby - visual tracking together, eye contact. This is how early visual tracking begins. Children watch faces, watch things drop, throw things. Try hiding things - encourage eyes/tracking to work harder - hide key feature required ie find the pencil. Saccades - jumping eyes from point to point. Persuit - smooth from start to finish egwatching car move across infront of us Fixation - eg stop a numberplate of car, ball - stick things on ball - watch ball then watch stop and fix on stop point. Classroom entry video available - 5 movements on video that can run children through after break. Nurses torch, some interesting point to focus on. Look left, look right, look up, look down. chin should be still. Lately Robyn has seen much whole head movement and increase of number of children finding this difficult. S...