Mornings with Hine

I have a student who chooses not to talk in many situations. I have been working with his family to develop strategies to support him at school. I also referred him for speech and language therapy. He was observed this week and her feedback was encouraging. Slowly during the year I have built a relationship and developed the student's trust. When he started at five years old there was no way of attaining any baseline data from him. So, when I knew his 5.6 testing was coming up I considered ways to support him to get fair and accurate data. I thought about going to his house and assessing him in his environment as I know he speaks confidently at home. Before embarking on this approach I decided to see what assessment I could get from him at school during my classroom release time. Surprisingly, he was able to verbally respond to each assessment I required from him! This meant I was able to report his results back to mum. I am feeling positive about the progress he is making and reco...

We all learn in different ways. Learning was designed 120 years ago and was broken up into subject, ability and age. The film stated that they school system is more set up as an organisation. Developing people who fit in to classes in block sessions around bells and schedules. Some points raised for me were: Manage the learning so kids can do it on their own.  Encouraging talking to each other without putting hands up. This was a thought provoking film which made me think of what more I could do with my students to increase student agency and allowing them freedom of choice in their day. The film was based around a school that had no bells and the curriculum was moulded around what the students wanted to learn. There was an emphasis on developing knowledge as well as what the teacher's referred to as soft skills. The students learnt about persistence and failure when they came up across problems around their learning. I am going to continue to provide more choice for my students an...

There is a number of students in my class with low oral language and I wanted to provide them with an experience that they could talk about and learn new vocabulary. I decided to take them on a farm visit. We built up a relationship through our blog with a class that is opposite to the farm. We commented on their blog and they commented on ours. They even made a post about their visit to the farm so we could see what we would do when we visited. We visited the farm and then went to visit our buddy class. The children were able to think, talk and write about their experience. They are still talking about the visit months later. We followed up with using cream to make butter, using butter and milk in our baking. We drove past a dairy factory too and the kids were excited, calling out that they could see the vats that stored the milk. Our buddy class introduced themselves, we talked about our farm visit and we saw their school. They really wanted to show us their playground.

My team have been having their appraisal discussions this term. I have worked through some of my documents and had a think about my goals. I have been working on some goals for literacy from last year. I met with Pippa to discuss my job description for the year and have been advised that I will not progress any further than that in the appraisal process this year as I am about to go on maternity leave.

I am continuing to support others to set up and use their professional blogs. I held a session with two teachers on how to get to their blog, how to post and using the schedule to time when you put your post up. We tried to download Blogger on their phones as I told them how easy I have found using the app to at least start the posts and then when I get to a laptop I go in and add the labels.