Discover Top Posts Tagged with #glong310staff

Image - Expanded Noun Phrases poster created by Grade 4 students

This week I took the opportunity to work with several Grade 4 students within my classroom, where I work as an Integration Aide. Within this group I chose a mixture of ability levels from below, at and above level in the area of Writing. Continuing with the Noun Phrases topic covered within the ECL310 Seminar, and in line with the Victorian Curriculum English: Level 4 content descriptor ‘Understand that the meaning of sentences can be enriched through the use of noun groups/phrases and verb groups/phrases and prepositional phrases’ (VCAA n.d.), I decided to get the students to think about the simple Nouns of ‘Cat’, ‘Tree’, ‘Castle’ and ‘Storm’ and the words they could use to describe each. This activity was derived from the sequence of activities given by Ljungdahl (2014, p. 322-3). Around the pictures, we listed all the words that the students came up with, from simple ideas such as ‘Playful’ for the Cat to ‘Old looking but still standing tall’ for the Castle. While I facilitated the discussion I ensured that I didn’t use any technical language or prompts other than “how could you describe these objects” and “could we use some of these in a sentence to make the object seem more exciting”. I was extremely surprised by the variety of descriptors that the students came up with as they included many types such as appearance, position and number amongst others. When the students began to build sentences, they effectively bounced their ideas off the previous students and ended up with extremely complex sentences that included a variety of descriptors. Without students being given technical language such as ‘determiners’ and ‘prepositions’, they were still able to use these grammatical functions to develop amazing sentences. Hopefully this activity has given the students new skills to improve their writing within the general classroom activities.

References

Ljungdahl, L 2014, in G Winch, R Ross Johnston, P March, L Ljungdahl & M Holliday (eds), Literacy: Reading, Writing and Children’s Literature, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, Australia, pp. 304-28.

VCAA - see Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority n.d., English: Curriculum, Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, retrieved 18 July 2019, <https://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/english/curriculum/f-10>

#glong310staff #nounphrases #victoriancurriculum #english #grammar

Image - Front Cover of The Forests of Silence (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-22/emily-roddas-deltora-quest/10146704)

I don’t quite remember when I began reading the Deltora Quest series however the first book in the series, The Forests of Silence (Rodda 2000), was released in 2000 so I imagine that I would’ve been in Grade 4 or 5 when I first picked it up. With its Fantasy Fiction genre, which Burcher et al. (2009, p. 227) describes as ‘one of fiction’s largest and fastest growing genres’ including ‘any work that contains magic or other elements that cannot be understood by the rules of reality’. I believe it was this idea that appealed to me as my home life as a child and teenager was difficult and I found an escape in these books. I guess my mind was enveloped in a similar way to the idea of Bastian Balthazar Bux disappearing into the magical world of Fantastica in The Neverending Story (Ende 1979). It was this escape and exciting adventure that led me to develop a passion for reading the fantasty genre, a passion I still hold today.

Reflecting upon this text and how it might influence my literacy teaching allowed me to explore the idea of which literacy mode I would explore first. I think reading to children and exploring a variety of text types sparks the curiosity of the child and then, after developing the reading ability, allows them to explore their own choice of text and genre. I had to do this exploration on my own later in my childhood but I feel that it is imperative that children discover their literary passions very early on in childhood. This passion will help them to listen to stories being read, engage in them thoughtfully and put them on a good path towards achieving the ability to read early on due to a self-driven desire.

References

Bircher, C, Hollands, N, Smith, A, Trott, B & Zellers, J 2009, ‘Core Collections in Genre Studies: Fantasy Fiction 101′, Reference & User Services Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 226-31, retrieved 14 July 2019, JSTOR Journals.

Ende, M 1979, The Neverending Story, Thienemann Verlag, Stuttgart, Germany.

Rodda, E 2000, The Forests of Silence, Scholastic Australia, Lindfield, NSW, Australia.

#glong310staff #fanstasy #emily rodda #deltora quest

Week 9

For my multimodal text I have chosen the extremely powerful ‘To This Day Project’ by Shane Koyczan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltun92DfnPY

This is an amazing example of using digital art and animation to add to a narrators impact when telling a story. The images serve as powerful exclamation marks on the narrators words to tell a truly impactful story.

This could be used in higher year levels as well as mature middle years levels to cover the difficult topic of bullying. This can then be used as inspiration for the students own creativity and using many different modes to express a story.

#ecl310 #glong310staff

Week 8 Recording

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a4xKDc-7RtoTl9jo9eMOveqSNqECinmp/view?usp=sharing

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Week 7

It is extremely important that teachers and students be able to interact. A teacher must be able to support a student in many different ways in order to make sure a student can reach their full potential. One way of doing this is to have an open, online area of discussion for students to interact with each other but to also ask the teacher questions. Such thing exists in Edmodo, which is explained in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHtwgZEHzNs

It also offers teachers the ability to find resources from other teachers around the world that they find useful.

Another resource is the My Storybook website. This allows students to create a story book online with their own drawings and pre-existing stickers and items as well. This would help tremendously with developing narrative writing.

https://www.mystorybook.com

#glong310staff #ecl310

Week 9 Post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHtjswaadTA

This Youtube video talks about the use of text and image working together. it shows how teachers can analyse multimodal texts mainly focusing on linguistic and visual skills. the video shows how multimodal texts are a powerful combination of modes in the current meaning.

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Week 8 Post

i didn’t have access to a camera.

The Running Record assessment was really good as it allows the teacher to articulate what the students read. There are different ways of identifying if the student has or hasn’t made a mistake. In the first row we can see that the student has made no errors. After that we can see that there is a consistency of errors. But in those errors we can see that the student has sounded out a word, three letters were sounded out and the last letter was identified but it still was an error. After that we can see that the student has begun to fix up the errors by self correcting themselves. Overall, we see that the students can start off strong and then finish on a low or it could be vice versa.

#glong310staff

Week 7 Post

One of my goals at the start of placement was to help the students with their spelling words. As there were 3 different groups for the students in spelling. You had the rabbits-they were the students who were at a lower level, then you had the giraffes and the pelicans - these were the students who were middle to high achievers in spelling. I wanted to work with the students in rabbits. That was my goal. The classroom teacher had a THRASS chart in her classroom and so i helped the students who were at the lower level using this chart.

Another goal was for me to help the students with their grammar and Punctuation as the classroom teacher had told me that they had forgotten it. So she advised me to use this book called “Teaching English Grammar: A handbook for Australian Teachers”. This resource guided me through teaching English Grammar and Punctuation. It also provided step by step lesson plans if i ever got stuck. But the classroom teacher also helped me.

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