Riddles, Riddles , Riddles and other Fun Engaging Activities as Evidence of Students' Learning and Progress

Today is our last day of home learning! The students are excited to return back to our wonderful creative classroom. 

As a reflection on our remote learning over the last 2 weeks, I'd like to review the most engaging activities that helped me scaffold my students' learning and monitor their progress. 

1. Comprehension strategies, oral language and vocabulary

When scaffolding reading, for example, we focused on making inferences. We started with simple questions about prompt pictures, then discussed our assumptions and learnt how to support our thinking with details. When working on texts, we previewed and discussed key vocabulary, chunked the text looking for clues and trying to read between the lines. We used talk moves: add on, waiting time, thumbs up, agree/disagree, etc.

2. Cognitive engagement and critical thinking - Riddles! False or True? Two truths & one lie.

At some stage, I noticed that children started to actively search for clues and we decided to practise our inference skills.  Initially, I offered a number of simple riddles for my students to solve. They enjoyed this activity and took initiative by preparing their own riddles for our online classes. They found and read a lot of riddles and jokes trying to select the most tricky ones to share with their classmates. I believe it can be counted as their deep cognitive thinking and engagement. This activity definitely increased their reading mileage too. 

My Y2-3 students were keen to make up their own riddles! 

True or false questions and the 'Two truths and one Lie" game were also very engaging and popular during our online classes and blogging time.

3. Questioning and Feedback - Ideas, Grammar, Sentences and Spelling.

Kahoot has always been popular in our class. The students used to play various quizzes that I created. This time, they felt confident enough to create their own Kahoot games. The students took initiative and were motivated to add interest to our online meets. The student-created Kahoots showed good thinking, digital and literacy skills.

I also promoted SMART commenting on peers' blogs. The students enjoyed expressing their opinions and communicating with their friends in a positive manner. I believe that blogging and commenting helped engage learners in good conversations about their learning and experiences.

Room 5 learners are very Smart Learners who know how to leave Smart Digital Footprints and enjoy Smart Digital relationships! Ano te Pai!

The Importance of Teacher and Peer Feedback during Remote Learning

I believe that we all know that giving feedback to students can be the bulk of the workload. Is the payoff worth the immense effort and time? In Visible Learning, John Hattie noted that feedback is “one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement”, so if you’d like to increase student achievement in your classroom, feedback can be the key to making it happen.

Blog commenting is a great and powerful teaching and learning tool which cannot be disregarded. Reflecting on my own experience,  I believe that online feedback helped promote good communication and build stronger positive relationships within our Room 5's classroom community.  Blogging and commenting provides authentic experiences to purposefully utilize students' reading and writing skills. I always encourage my learners to check out their peers' blogs, give, receive and respond to feedback. 

My 2020 lockdown experiences proved that promoting peer blog commenting helps connect students with their friends, teachers and wider communities. Moreover, according to research, through exposure to a multitude of opinions and through awareness of writing for a wider audience, blogs also foster cognitive engagement and critical thinking because learners need to reflect on the possible reactions of others to their postings.

Examples of my Y2-3 learners' comments: 

Home Learning Round 2

Here we go again... Home Learning round 2! Level 3 caught us in the middle of our exciting LCS Book Week project! The children were disappointed as they were so keen to write a script and perform their new play! I know that some of them continued working on the script during the first days of Level 3. It clearly shows their engagement and genuine interest in their learning.

I'm grateful to our school management as they decided to distribute free loan devices to our Year 2-3 students. It definitely reflected in an increased number of children that I've been seeing online during our Google Meets or working on their learning programmes. Out of 20 children in my Y2-3 class, I normally see 12-14 students twice a day and 18 are actively busy working on their programmes. What a success!

This sudden change in learning environment made me stop and rethink my professional inquiry again. After some consideration, I am determined to continue with my focus on promoting deep learning that requires students to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking across the curriculum using Learn-Create-Share.

When designing my lessons, I try to ensure that activities are personally meaningful for my students. Last week, we focused on making inferences and sharing our experiences. I believe it helped connect the online learning tasks with students' previous knowledge and experiences in personally relevant ways.

During our google meets I usually focus on questions that encourage deeper reflection and personal responses from my learners and stimulate real, authentic conversations, for example: 'Why do Zebras have stripes?' or ' Are dolphins smart? Why?' I also use these conversations to develop active use of specific vocabulary, collaborative and questioning skills and foster their confidence and curiosity. 

It is so rewarding to see that my students initiate authentic conversations by sharing their topics of interest. They ask questions and give feedback to each other and even plan for the next activities that we could do together during the home learning period.

Examples of student-driven collaborative activities:

- Creating our class digital library (students created read-aloud).

- Creating and playing Kahoots of their interest (rugby, Te Reo, maths, rhymes and alliterations, etc)

- Blogging. Sharing their personal presentations like cooking,  dances and songs, art, stories etc)

- Commenting on each other blogs leaving smart and specific comments.

Learning, Creating and Sharing - week 2

During the week following our first collaborative session, we continued to talk about our favourite books. One of my inquiry focuses is on making students' learning experiences authentic by designing LCS projects based on their interests and taking into account their identities. During this project, we put students' interests at the centre of their learning and I believe this approach inspired our young learners to create many wonderful written texts, art and digital objects.

Reflecting on our class identities, It was very interesting to observe how different classes focused on different aspects of LCS. One of the classes discussed the story elements and created their own characters and settings in response to the book they'd selected. I believe they now aim for rewriting the 'model text' and creating their own book! The students started to work on some illustrations. How exciting was to see such creative writers and artists! 

Another class focused on descriptive writing, unpacked new vocabulary and dug even deeper talking about characters' feelings in the book. The students presented their descriptions to the audience and received well-deserved Pakipaki!

My class decided to use one of the famous book characters and completely change the settings of the story! We brainstormed a lot of problems and solutions, wrote a number of short plays, acted them out and performed to the other classes last Friday. I promote the use of drama techniques to support literacy learning. I believe it makes reading and writing activities more engaging and meaningful for students,  enhances critical and creative thinking skills, thus I hope it will help my students to formulate and express ideas and opinions. 

Our Y2-3 students were highly engaged and motivated. They were proud to present what they had created and tried their best sharing authentic learning experiences. Our next step is to do some blog posts sharing our project with a wider audience and connecting our learners online.  Teachers will plan for shared writing lessons to write smart comments on the other class blogs and then allow our students to leave more smart positive personal comments.

Year 2-3 Collaborative Learn-Create-Share Book Week project

My personal goals:

Engage and collaborate with my team by involving them in the cross-curricular LCS project from the planning stage to the celebration of the school Book Day in 3 weeks

Provide our students with meaningful and exciting experiences based on their interests.

Day #1 

• Collecting student voice/ interests - Learner Identity

• Oral language 

• Vocabulary 

• Critical thinking

• Collecting and analysing data

• Love of learning 

• Creativity (Drama, Visual arts including modern visual arts which use technology: photography, video, filmmaking, etc)

• Cybersmart across the curriculum

• Learn-Create-Share!!!

What a day we had! Full of fun, reading, learning, creating and sharing our reading preferences and favourite books. We had to work together in a respectful manner and give our opinions. We, teachers, were blown away by our students' ideas and thinking! It was a long day but our young learners were absolutely enthusiastic to participate in this project. They took ownership of their learning and were proud to express their learner identities.

Our students' ideas:

The feedback from my colleagues after the beginning of this project was very rewarding. They found that their students were highly engaged and motivated during various follow-up writing and reading activities.  The outcomes were impressive quantity- and quality-wise. Even the reluctant writers asked to extend their writing time to complete their work.

We will meet and share our wonderful learning next Friday! The students are very excited to share with other students and find out what the other classes created during the week.

Planning my Intervention to Raise Student Achievement in Literacy

Inquiry: How can I change my practice to raise student achievement in literacy by promoting deep learning that requires students to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking across the curriculum using Learn-Create-Share?

I am a great believer that if a person genuinely wants to learn something, he/she will be successful. My job is to help my students find their interests, support and scaffold them during their learning process. I think about all the wonderful LCS opportunities that my learners and I can plan together to fully engage and explore in learning that is exciting and meaningful growing their learner identity as enthusiastic explorers and creators. 

This year, I’ve started to implement drama activities ‘giving students the chance to use all skills in decoding meaning, understanding the feelings of others, expanding vocabulary, making appropriate use of syntax, analyzing discourse, generating feedback within context, and building metacognitive knowledge’ (McMaster, 1998; Urian, 2000).

After analysing students voice and research findings, reading blog posts of my COL colleagues and reflecting on my teaching practice, I finalised my intervention that I have started to implement and already see clear signs of students successes.

My intervention is based on:

• Putting my students at the very centre of their learning and making their learning experiences authentic by designing LCS projects based on their interests and taking into account their identities.
• Scaffolding my learners during their projects by implementing and consistently using the tasks designed to improve their vocabulary and reading comprehension.
• Utilizing drama to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking and raise students achievement in reading and writing.