My Yearly Goal

A week or two ago we came up with our yearly goals. Since I have moved down to year 1 and am still wrapping my head around the NZ system, I thought a good goal would be:

To develop an effective guided reading programme for year one students

Breaking it down, my plan of action is thus far:

1. Observe other teachers during guided reading, reflecting on what they are doing that is effective. Integrating those effective practices into my own teaching.
2. Seek and complete readings to help further develop activities to complete with children in small groups.
3. Look for and provide quality, level and age appropriate, interesting texts in the classroom through discussions with other teachers as well as children.
4. Make a list of all tumble activities currently being used.
5. Observe and discuss with other teachers what tumble activities they are using. Research other potential activities via teaching journals, the Internet and other sources.
6. Attempt a variety of different activities and reflecting upon their effectiveness, re-using, modifying or getting rid of where appropriate.
7. Change activities throughout the year as children’s achievement improves and to avoid boredom.
8. Ask children to explain the tumble activities to ensure that they are aware of what to do. Observe children completing activities to ensure they are doing them properly. Ask for children’s feedback as to the difficulty/ease of activities and to discover if children are interested.

In the week and a bit since I've made this goal, I've paid close attention to how effective my teaching has been. My activities (in my opinion) are not as great as they could be, nor are my children trained up in them well. Over the next few weeks, as I get my head wrapped around other things (planning and getting the room sorted out a bit more) I plan on having a few discussions (and hopefully some observations) of other teachers doing guided reading.

One area where I have started to focus a bit on at the moment is pre and post activities. I've already had the chance to look at a few from other teachers and have had a few discussions about which activities are good. I feel like the activities I've made for this week (week 4) are much better than the ones for week 3. I've been trying to use a lot of visual things and to get away from just drawing pictures for pre activities. I'm looking forward to seeing the end product of this learning journey and to updating my progress on this site.