Monitoring the effects of the implementation of the intervention

Changed practice/intervention: Providing children with prompts/scaffolds to support speaking and presenting to encourage use of language.

How am I going to monitor the effects of the implementation of this intervention/changed practice?

In a spreadsheet, I will record how children respond to use of this intervention each time it is used.

Here is an example:

Date: 5.08.21

Task: How does a Long Jumper's body move?

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Child: Ana

Prompt: I was thinking about what ________ said, and I was wondering what if ___________ .

Response: I was thinking about what John said about the length of a long jumpers legs, and I was wondering what difference it would make if a long jumper had longer arms. Would they be able to propel themselves further forward?

Lockdown: August - September 2021

We have spent most of this last term in lockdown due to Covid-19. During my time working from home, I have been responsible for the continuation of PENN, our Pt England Network News. I have been really fortunate to have an amazing team of children working with me to make this happen. Daily email correspondence with the children has been essential. Rather than me selecting which children are going to present each day, I have made it the responsibility of the children to commit by putting their name down to present each day. This has been really successful and there have only been a few occasions when I've had to follow up on children who have forgotten or find replacements when I can't get hold of someone.

Here is an example of the finished product:

You can see that another big part of my job from home has been to put together examples of learning that have been happening at home during lockdown. It has been great to share so much on PENN each day and to document this time in our lives! As well as looking through many children's blogs myself, I have received regular emails from some teachers with children's work they want me to share but I have also received emails from children who are proud of something they have done and want some of their learning shared. Celebration of this has been a huge part of what I have been working on from home. 

In addition to producing the news each day, I have taken my year 5 & 6 and year 7 & 8 extension classes weekly and have run Creative Space meets each week for Team 4 (year 5 & 6) and for Team 3 (year 3 & 4). On Fridays, I have run an elective class for Team 5 (year 7 & 8).

Year 7 & 8 Controversial Topic Brainstorm: Which country should some Olympic athletes compete for? Click on the link to see the children's work for one of our google meets.

I have developed a number of lessons to support children to be Creative in their learning at home:

This activity was designed for year 3 & 4 children working on Scratch. Here are some examples of children who completed the challenges from this lesson:

Hunter

- Challenge 1

- Challenge 2

- Challenge 3

- Challenge 4

Jackson

- Challenge 1

- Challenge 2

- Challenge 3

- Challenge 4

- Challenge 5

- Challenge 6

For Māori Language week, I ran a Scratch session on creating a digital pepeha/mihi. I ran this with both Team 3 and Team 4. This was a model I provided to the children for this activity:

The week after this, with the Team 3 children, I introduced the extensions that came on Scratch. Some of the children who had been doing lots of Scratch from home were really interested in this. Here is a project which Jaxon made to show how he can make his sprites draw in Scratch.

With Team 2 (year 2 children), I took google meets for each of the classes where I taught them how to do Stop Motion Animation. 

I created this 'How to' Video to support the children (and teachers) in a rewindable way:

Here are some of the fantastic finished products by children in year 2 and 3:

Tomorrow I will run this session with Team 1 (year 1 children). I will also run it with Team 3 (year 3s and 4s) and will include support to children on chrome books to teach them how they can do Stop Motion in google slides.

Keeping my inquiry going during lockdown

When we went into lockdown, I was halfway through testing the children on another picture vocabulary test. The difference was, I was providing the children with the prompt cards so they could use them if they wanted them. The results were looking really positive. But then lockdown happened. This means I'll have to wait to find out how the other children did!

Whilst in lockdown, I have still been seeing classes through google meets. This has allowed me to continue my inquiry, even if it isn't to the same momentum it had while we were physically at school. Each time I meet with my year 5 & 6 extension children, we have been exploring a different photograph.  The photographs I have chosen are ones from the New York Times: :What's going on in this picture. The children are really excited each week to talk about a new photograph and the conversation is becoming richer and richer. I have been forcing myself to take a step back, not share ideas and see how the children go with conversing around the photos. The conversation prompts are being used however usually the use of these dies off after the conversation has warmed up.

I spent some time researching other provocations that I could use with the children and I found this really cool resource called 'Once upon a picture.'

What I like about this resource is that it breaks the focus up into collections depending on what your focus is: inferring, predicting, thinking, characters etc. There is also a fantastic 'Challenge Book' which you can download.