Ideas for Assessment # 2

1. Ideas for Assessment # 2 • This plan uses your literacy teacher lens. • It can be broad, or can be limited to a few activities. • It has to encompass the needs of your profiled learner • The 3 X ‘L’ strands: either/or/both: AC:E – VC:E • It needs to use more than one learning mode • It needs to focus on Literature texts, highlighting one. • The following slides give examples, ideas & a model

2. Developing a learning Plan Term planning/units of work • Needs of the students you have • May need to consider modes: whole school / groups / individual • Curriculum • Calendar

3. Individual planning • How you cater for individuals within your broader yearly and term planning? • Individual reading programs • Individual writing programs • Individual spelling programs

4. Multiliteracy considerations chapter 21 Winch et al… • Individual students // • Whole class • Within context of multiliteracies • Reading Reading • Writing Writing • Viewing Viewing • Oral Language Oral Language • Listening Listening • Visual, kinaesthetic and cognitive aspects of learning

5. Knowledge of what good readers do • Different (the 4)resources • Code breaker • Semantic • Syntactic • Graphophonic • Visual • Meaning maker • Literal • Inferential • Evaluative • Critical • Text user • Different purposes of text • Genres • Layout • Linguistic features • Text analyst • Multiple readings • Dominant reading • Gaps and silences • Motivation for reading • Enjoyment • Appreciation

6. How to develop good readers • Individual student • Home reading program • Explicitly teach • Reading conferences • Guided reading • Reciprocal teaching • Learning journals • Independent reading • Whole class • Explicit teaching • Demonstrations • Reading to students • Modelling reading behaviours • Shared reading • Integrate reading across other literacy modes • Integrate reading across other curriculum areas

7. Have you factored in the aspects of your learner’s communicative abilities based on the contexts in which they use them? •••

8. Look at this model introduction of Assignment #2 • The following reflects the observations of a young learner during a student placement. Danielle is not the young person’s real name. • Danielle is a 12 year old girl in Year 6 at a State primary school in the Latrobe Valley. The predominant demographic of the children at Danielle’s school are from working class families and families of lower socio-economic capacity. Danielle does not differ from her peer group in this respect. Danielle lives with her father, step-mother and younger half-sister. Her father and biological mother separated when she was in Year 2. Following this, Danielle’s father moved taking her with him, and Danielle started at her second and current primary school in Year 3. Danielle’s parents did not complete secondary school. Their highest achievement was Year 10. Danielle’s father has always worked as an unskilled worker, however her step-mother has recently started at TAFE. Danielle reports that her grandmother plays a big part in the family and although Danielle catches the bus to school in the morning, her grandmother looks after Danielle and her sister in the afternoon. • Danielle’s Year 6 class has 27 students with a relatively even divide between boys and girls. The class is arranged into four pods of tables with six to eight students per pod. Danielle’s teacher runs a subject-by-subject curriculum (Hill, 2006) and every day has a two hour literacy block broken into an hour each of reading and writing. The students in her class are spread across the spectrum of academic abilities, from bright and motivated to disengaged and apathetic towards the classwork. Danielle is an enthusiastic learner and was observed maintaining a focus on her work for a large percentage of the lessons. She frequently helps her friends and contributes to class discussions. Regarding her enthusiasm, Danielle’s classroom teacher remarked that Danielle would put her hand up to answer questions regardless of whether she knew the answer or not. Danielle has a large group of friends, both in her class and the broader year level. She is well liked and respected by her friends. Danielle reports that she likes school, with her favourite subjects being mathematics, art and physical education. Her aspirations regarding school include completing secondary school and studying family law at university. • In a literacy interview, Danielle stated that she enjoys reading and writing, but finds these difficult at times. Danielle demonstrated some insight into her current challenges with reading stating “...I read for two purposes. I select books I am interested in, but I know I am not a very good reader, so I need to practice…”. An example of this is in response to being asked what her favourite book is, Danielle stated Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl. Danielle reported that she has read it four times and likes it because of the action and humour, however more telling was the statement used by Danielle to wrap up the question “…It’s a good level for me..”, suggesting that Danielle feels confident with this book, familiar with its contents and therefore it is safe and meets her needs. In further questioning of Danielle’s reading habits, she revealed that she likes to read in bed before she goes to sleep, but otherwise spends her free time doing household chores, playing with her sister, watching television and playing videogames, and more recently watching YouTube videos to assist in creating Loom Band bracelets. Danielle reported that she was rarely read to as a younger child and can’t remember when her parents last read to her or her sister.

9. & a section of the Part 2 of the assessment • In considering a response to Danielle’s literacy learning, a program should focus on her strengths, while weaving in exercises to extend her in areas where she is less confident. Approaching this process through a social constructivist perspective is important. Danielle is in Year 6, at the pinnacle of her primary school community and with a well-established understanding of the people in her year level and class. Learning activities should extend beyond the classroom to promote Danielle as a leader and potential mentor to younger students. In her class, activities should focus on areas of interest to the class in order to optimise their learning, but the teacher will need to have a particular focus on Danielle to ensure that she receives the appropriate scaffolding with reading and writing to keep her in her zone of proximal development (Hill, 2006). According to the Literacy Secretariat (2012), effective literacy teaching occurs through a balanced and integrated program, where the learning within the five literacies are linked, that the five literacies are utilised across the relevant AusVELS domains and that a sense of community is fostered. • An excellent resource that enables young learners to become immersed in a theme is the book My Place by Nadia Wheatley. It has appeal at any year level, but is particularly relevant to Year 6, as students become less egocentric and more worldly, their own identity becomes a focus and the book supports a wide range of learning outcomes across the domains in the Australian Curriculum. Historical aspects of Danielle’s school, town and land can be blended with the students’ own family of origin stories and overall increase the students’ sense of community and belonging, enabling an increased sense of safety and capacity to learn. Specific to language, literature and literacy, My Place would be a good focus for enabling Danielle’s growth. • To begin with the students would be grouped at their table pods according to their skill sets and how students could complement each other. Hill promotes cooperative groups and offers that these promote positive interdependence, leadership, interpersonal skills, tolerance of others and sharing goals. With respect to Danielle, her open enthusiastic nature would encourage the less confident students, and she would benefit from peers that are at a similar academic capacity. This will ensure that Danielle feels worthwhile, confident and supported in her learning, even though she may not be at the top of the class. • Observations of Danielle in class showed that she is computer literate and quite capable of navigating a tablet device. Using this strength a task may be to research information about the history of her town and write under certain headings. The intention being that a poster is produced and then presented to the class. This task utilises Danielle’s strengths in computer literacy and confidence within herself and peer group to present a poster, while extending her learning by writing a poster that is informative and uses correct punctuation and text structure. The task shifts the writing focus from the narrative of My Place to informative of non-fiction text. Another exercise that promotes language for interaction is an interview with family members about her family history. This task would require Danielle to adopt an enquiry approach to her writing, creating questions and thinking about how she will ask these, and taking notes. An outcome could be that Danielle writes a short biography on a particular family member. • Mapping is another exercise that provides great links to visual literacies. •••• ••••••