School Goal Number #2: Sharing departmental literacy strategies

One of our department goals is to utilise literacy strategies across our junior school to support achievement in reading and writing. At our department meeting today, our team shared some of the literacy strategies that we have learnt from our PLD with Marc Milford, our literacy guru, who was present to provide feedback and feed forward.

There were lots of good activities that our team shared which was really great to see.  One particular strategy that Sonya Robertson had taught in her classroom, utilised resources from a site called Newsela (anyone can join the newsela site with their google account).   On the site, it has current events articles that allow you to choose the reading level applicable for your kids.  Below is an example. 

The title and article are for the less able readers as shown by the drop down box.

The same article but at more advanced level for the more able students

Students were then asked to use a scaffolded template of predicting, questioning and selecting 20 key words from the article, then select the 6 most important words.  Using this list, students were asked to summarise what the article was about in their own.  They then used this summary in a blog post.  Here are a few examples of blog posts:

It was awesome to hear how students such as Kaleb, who has had time off school, show his learning in his blog.  Sonya pushed him to get it done and she shared how she felt she had made progress in helping him with his work.  Marc was really impressed in the modal verbs that some of the students were using and suggested that a point be made to the students what the modal verbs were and how these helped develop their summary.  I was really proud of the strategies that Sonya and the team have used so far to address the learning needs of our kids.  I look forward to hearing more in the future.