Mapping teaching and learning: Handwriting and Reading
In this PLD session, we began some practical thinking about how learning will look in our classrooms next year. As this is a big project, we are going to break it down over the next few weeks.
Alignment and consistency are emerging as themes when we talk about improving how we support our students AND how the new curricula work. We agreed to apply these lenses to our discussions by taking a closer look at two specific curriculum areas.
Our process was:
1. Map how these subjects are being taught currently across our school. The aim here was to get a clear view of the journey our children are on at the moment.
2. Cross-match our current practice with the journey described in the new curriculum.
3. Examine this to draw conclusions about PLD needs, scope for alignment and collaboration, what's new and needs our attention, what needs a little extra polish.
We chose to focus first on Handwriting (which gets more of a spotlight in the new English curriculum) and then Reading.
Handwriting
Some key reflections:
- Phase 2: what might handwriting look like in years 4 - 6 now? What's appropriate for some/all?
- Resourcing: books, lined/unlined paper, tables, pencils (or not?), programme?
- What's the gold standard: seating position, 'slope', pencil grip, resourcing (writing with what, on what?)
Essentially, we need to know more about evidence-based handwriting practice. We don't yet have a shared understanding about what best practice looks like at each stage.
Reading
- We're keen to understand what's different between years 3 and 4, and also what is different for the year 4s as compared with year 5s. What do the year 3s bring with them - and what ways of reading are they and their whānau familiar with?
- Equally, what do we notice as year 1s progress on to year 2 learning? What do they bring and what ways of reading are they familiar with.
- We noticed that year 3 and 4 might involve more learning to recognise what features are being used in a text. In years 5 and 6, the shift is toward analytical thinking about how and why writers choosing to do what they're doing.