Grammar

I have the Christmas carols blasting in the background (well, as loud as you can when five children are sleeping).  My marking for today is done.  We started the week with a piece of writing (drafted in class, own editing, then re-written by them the next period) so that I could have a quick sneak snapshot at how they are with on the spot writing.  I made a rubric that used similar criteria to the E-astle writing and I have been able to see clearly already that their ideas are confidently Multistructural, with several students being clearly Relational.  The writing has also shown me that I need to think about different ways to present grammar and the rules surrounding it to my students.

Source

I have these memories of a big thick yellow grammar textbook and working through pages and pages of diagramming out sentences (do we still do that? anyone?) along with circling direct objects, underlining the verbs, and double underlining the adverbs.   I am sure exercises and 'rote' learning have some place (somewhere), but I am not convinced that it is the best way for my students.  I know last year they really enjoyed (and I saw better use of sentence structure/grammar in the assessments afterwards) gamification - so I need to explore what is available at the higher year levels.

So ... some questions ... what do you use for teaching grammar and sentence construction in your classroom?  What rubrics/SOLO taxonomy  breakdowns have you used (if you don't mind sharing)?

Note taking

Note taking is a skill that is starting to be required more and more.  In both my senior classes this term, the skills of skimming and scanning for information are something we are learning.  The students are working on a personal research project, which will be linked to a speech in front of their peers.  I too, am having to develop my skimming and scanning as I am taking part in a PD research project run by Otago University.  

The project is looking at ideas and concepts surrounding future focused literacy.  This week we were exploring the way students are both 'text users' and 'text analysts.'  It has been great for me to be able to step back into 'student' mode as the delivery method has required me to step up and take notes to ensure I can refer back to them when contributing to the written work.

Some of my notes from my PD #edsketch15

I have enjoyed playing around with some different note taking strategies, sketching, arrows, tables and just plain key words.  It has been a real eye-opener to remember exactly how much concentration it takes to listen and take notes for a length of time.  I need to remember this with my own students - limit the up-front talk time.  I need to investigate the concept of 'flipped classroom' more - but that also makes me wonder, if they students weren't actively engaging/notetaking - would it be useful? Would I end up with half a class who have and half a class of 'have not had time.'?

Starting with SOLO

One of my inquiry goals this year is to investigate (and implement) ways to improve the literacy of my Junior classes.  The school I am at has had some PD prior to my arrival on SOLO taxonomy.  I started investigating this about 8 weeks ago, and quickly found a strong model of understanding that students could identify with and that I thought was going to be useful in my classroom.

This model for learning, named "SOLO Taxonomy (structure of observed learning outcomes) provides a simple, reliable and robust model for three levels of understanding – surface deep and conceptual (Biggs and Collis 1982)." Source

It has  been great to not only be able to use the Pam Hook website and books that our staffroom has, but also to engage with other English teachers around NZ who have had actual classroom experience with this through the Secondary English list.    A source that I would not have sought out first, but ended up being useful was Pinterest - just goes to show you, don't discount the odd places.

So, all excited and inspired, on the first day back in term I had a go with my Junior classes.  We had briefly touched on the concpts of SOLO at the end of last term - so we recapped the levels of thinking before starting on some activities.   Over the holidays they had been assigned a novel, so they took the main characters and events and then connected them to each other using the sides of the hexagons.  It was a great way for them to start to see how characters and events intertwined.  Later in the day I used the hexagons again to link ideas and concepts together from feature articles.

Breaking down the concepts - (love my whiteboard tables!)

Seeing what ideas link

Senior class using hexagons to get ideas from a feature article and linked the articles ideas with their own prior knowledge.  The group then shared their ideas and putting them together for a collaborative knowledge hexagon.