ECL310

Gracie Lucignani 215087596

[mattforsythe]

The Brilliant Deep is a new picture book biography about Ken Nedimeyer - a Florida diver who started a global movement to heal coral.

Coming in May, 2018.

[ecl310-year3]

Looking through the #picturebooks I was surprised, the amazing illustrations caught my attention straight away. If it caught my attention, i thought this would grab the attention of my students as well right. The illustrations are so detailed and unique from post to post. Just captivating honestly. 

The range of books that i have come across through this # way surprising, from old books that I was read in school, books that were published way before i was born and the new work that is coming out day-to-day were mind blowing. As we are in university and smaller school resources we are exposed to are limited. Using a website like this is brilliant as it exposes us teachers to niche and small publishers books, and may be helpful to engage the students in the classroom 

What i found particularly interesting in this # is this book - The Brilliant Deep, not only does it look beautiful, i love the fact that it is a biography that is accessible for students through being a picture book of a global movement. This book could be used in many different classes ranging from sustainability, inquiry, science, english and even mathematics. 

[ecl310-year3]

Prompt 7 - http://education.abc.net.au/home#!/media/31590/super-stories-the-abandoned-house-nouns-and-adjectives

I chose to do a brainstorm of the resource, I have added audio to explain my thinking further. 

[ecl310-year3]

Here is My RAN chart for Prompt 6 

[ecl310-year3]

I have chosen to use a Padlet for prompt 5. I think this platform is perfect for this task, as it allows students to use ICT,  have questions in front of them and collate the whole classes thoughts together. 

[ecl310-year3]

Placement! What a whirl wind that was. I was placed at a school that had AMAZING resources. This was my first pick up. While I was in grade 4, I witnessed and participated in the student’s book club, which had replaced reading groups for the term. The students were spilt up into groups based on the book they wanted to read! Amazing, and every week the students would assume a different role in the group. There was the predictor, questioner, summariser, visualiser and connector. This mean that every chapter the students had all these comprehension strategies at their fingertips, working together as a group. I loved it and I loved the different take that every student had on the different roles. It worked well for all groups, as everyone would end up supporting each other with their tasks. Every week as the introduction the teacher would introduce the focus on one of those skills, for example first week was summarising and the students would practice this skill on the class book that they were reading, which would in turn make their book clubs better and more detailed.

As for writing, while I was there I only got to see the unit of work on persuasive techniques. The students mainly used anchor charts that they obviously had made at the beginning of the unit. These grade 4s made sure to use as many as they could in their work. Every session allowed time for students to give each other feedback, and then students would apply this in their next lesson. It was like a well-oiled car. This I could see was allowing students to disengage from the tasks. By the end of the unit they had written the same persuasive piece 6 times, by just replacing words, but using basically the same structure. The teacher explained that this was to allow students to become familiar with the persuasive structure for NAPLAN in the following year. As much as I can see why they were doing it that way, I felt that this mean that students had a very rigid and boring idea of persuasive writing, where instead of students feeling passionate about the subject and really wanting the reader to see their point of view, they wrote just to fill the structure. I wish that the teacher had let the students explore other types of persuasive writing, but NAPLAN results were quite obvious the drive behind this unit.

[ecl310-year3]

[ecl310-year3]

This is a literacy poster that I pulled from my placement classroom. I think that this is a great for students to see and understand. I think that it is important that students understand that writing does not involve writing everything. To write succinct and engaging pieces, and to develop their ideas further, students must be able to write small. This gives students a visual representation on how to do that. Choose a whole, and write a seed. 

[ecl310-year3]

Reading this prompt, only 1 experience came to my mind. Much the same as you, my fondest memory of reading in the classroom came from Roald Dahl, but for me it was the BFG. I remember being very scared in grade 2 at being placed with a male teacher, I thought he would be stern and tuff like most of the  other teachers at the school. Instead he sat down and read us, ‘The BFG.’ He used amazing expression and knew right when to close the book to create the most tension and have the biggest hook. He would say the made up words with ease, as if he had written the whole book. At the end of the book, i remember going up and asking whether i could borrow his book to show my parents at home. He of course being the amazing teacher he was said of course! I made my parents read that book over and over. I remember saying after a year with Mr Cooper, ‘I’m going to be a teacher like him one day.’ This may be why i can recall this memory so vividly. He made me fall in love with Roald Dahl’s works and reading novels, and I will always thank him for that. 

[heartsnmagic]