Term 3 Inquiry reflection 2024

As is the case in a reception class Term 3 brought many new tamariki  and changes to my teaching timetable.  As the reception class grew it was necessary for me to stop teaching Tier 2 groups and take my learnings from this and apply them to my classroom setting.

My original inquiry question was: How can I accelerate the reading progress of my group of Tier 2 learners by providing motivating feedback?

I have adapted my inquiry question for the rest of the year to:

How can I accelerate the reading progress of New Entrant learners by providing explicit feedback?

My first task was to consider what specific knowledge I wanted the learners to acquire in their first weeks at school, in order to accelerate their ability to read using the BSLA scope and sequence.  I settled on letter/sound recognition as being the fundamental skill required for new learners.  I then had to design feedback that would be motivational to the students and able to be applied across the entire class.  Obviously verbal feedback is a natural part of the teaching process, however I wanted to use a method which was both visual to the students and whanau.

I decided to make use of their home learning book as a way to share their progress with whanau.  I designed a 1 page document which included all of the letter sounds they would learn in their first 10 weeks of the BSLA programme.  This is pasted into their home learning books.  Each week we record the letter sound knowledge of the students by adding a sticker to the page when a sound grapheme relationship is learnt.  When the student has stickers on all the graphemes they receive a prize.

Students seem excited to see their sticker haul grow and share their success with their whanau.