ASSESSMENT

Conferring

“Conferring with students is formative assessment at its best.” Kath Murdoch (“The Power of Inquiry 2015)

 

Being led by Kath Murdoch’s idea that conferring is inquiring into students’ learning, I decided to allocate time for a fortnightly conferring session and turn it into a routine.

My students change their home reading books in my EFL class 3 times a week.  It gives me a chance to discuss the books, their reading goals, and strategies.

At least once in a fortnight, I make sure I confer with each of my EAL students to find out more about their learning, where they are at and give them feedback and guidance.

We discuss how they feel about their reading progress, how they are moving towards their goals, what next steps they have to take to improve their skills.  This opportunity to confer with each child helps me to meet their individual language needs better.

It also supports my professional growth as an educator.  In order to make my conferring with students more deliberate and structured, I have to improve my questioning skills. Conferring has influenced my planning tremendously as I am able to differentiate better based on the individual students’ needs. 

Conferring helps the teacher to understand the students better, find out more about their learning styles and provides a lot of information for report writing and liaising with parents.

My conversations with parents become more meaningful and the exchange of strategies more productive. During such conversation an educator has the opportunity to learn about family literacy practices or the lack of them, discuss goals and expectations in child development, and last but not least upgrade the rapport with parents.

EAL In Class Support 

In Miss Anita's and Mr. James's rooms the students enthusiastically follow the Daily Five routines. If any parents want to learn more about the Daily Five routines and support their children at home they can find some useful information here. 

This week I supported our EAL students in their word work and helped them to research the chosen words and make sentences with them. At times I wore the hat of a reading partner, modeled engaged and respectful listening and questioning strategies. I also had a chance to confer with my Full Support EAL students. I listened to their reading and asked them what they thought about their reading skills, their strengths, and challenges. I provided immediate feedback. My students talked to me about their reading goals and we discussed the best next steps for each child. These sessions provided a lot of information for my assessment and planning and helped me to meet the language needs of my students better.

Listening to reading is a very popular task.

During our math time, the Grade 3 students investigated what a kilogram is. The task was to fill three plastic bags with rice. (100g, 500g and 1kg).  Everybody had lots of fun, some rice was spilled, some students learned how to read the scales and finally, the three bags were full.

Gunn really enjoyed the activity.

Shintaro was very precise in his estimation of what one kilogram of rice would look and weigh like.

In all Grade 3 classrooms, the students were busy completing the summative assessment of the unit of inquiry. In Miss Lisa's room the presentations were very successful and the audience learned a lot of interesting facts about various biomes and animal and plant adaptation.

Yuzuka practiced hard and her presentation was one of the best.

In my EFL class,  I chose for my students to complete comprehension tasks about biomes and animal and plant adaptation to provide more information for my students and support them in their research for the summative assessment.

Independent work on comprehension tasks during the EFL class

On Friday I also found time to confer with my students about their home reading programme and all 9 individual conferences went very well and were very productive.

I complemented Raymond on his book choice and we also discussed some useful reading strategies that Raymond should use.

In Class EAL Support Grade 3

Miss Anita's students and Mr. James's students continued to learn about the 5 daily routines that help them develop their reading and writing skills. Every day our students have to:

• Read to self;
• Read to someone;
• Do some word work;
• Listen to reading;
• Work on their writing. 

Our English language learners are engaged in the same routines and their favourite is listening to reading. I usually support them during their word work and writing time. Often my students choose to practice reading with me first before they read with one of their friends. 

Shintaro is reading to himself.

Lucas and Shintaro are reading to each other and Miss Mom monitors the routine.

Gunn is listening to reading.

In Miss Anita's  and Miss Lisa's classrooms our students created beautiful poems, using metaphors and similes. We revised what a simile and what a metaphor was and created a shared poem for students to use as a model. Next, the children were given time to create their own poems independently and finally we had a sharing session on the carpet. Lots of our students were proud of their poems and had an intention to publish them on their blogs.

Miss Lisa's students enjoyed sharing their poems.

Miss Lisa's students revised their unit vocabulary and practiced various spelling strategies.

Constanza, Yuzuka and Shawn worked together to improve their spelling skills.

Mr. James's EAL beginners played a lot of various spelling games and their favorite was Bingo with sight words.

Gunn id the winner!!!

English As a Foreign Language Class Grade 3 

During our EFL classes, my Grade 3 students were engaged in a collaborative activity.  The children had to read a book Earth's Water, choose a topic they wanted to focus on (eg. Uses of Water, Water Pollution, etc) and create a poster in a small group of 3 students. 
While working on the posters my students were involved in meaningful discussions about the new facts they learned from the book. They also argued about which photos to use, asked and answered numerous questions. It was exciting to observe their choice of strategies and to hear the academic language of the unit in use.

Meyher consulted with Miss Boramey while creating a poster.

Helmi, Daylin and Irrham created a great poster about how people use water.

Daylin, Helmi and Irrham are presenting

When the posters were done, my students presented them to the whole group. 

Yuzuka and Lucas being real risk-takers!! Yuzuka spoke up!! They talked about the importance of water.

Edwin, Takuto and Janora talked about water pollution.

Gunn and Shintaro talked about the various states of water.

Grade 3 English as a Foreign Language Class

Recently my Grade 3 English language learners practiced reading comprehension strategies. We read about our favorite characters Henry and Mudge and also about Frog and Toad.  We learned how to write summaries, discussed how to make deep connections and tried to analyze what caused the problem in the story. 

Constanza is thinking about deep and surface connections.

Miss Mom supported Yuzuka, Shintaro, Gunn and Lucas to make different types of connections.

One of our learning intentions this week was to construct understanding about the water cycle. Our success criteria were to learn and be able to explain the words: EVAPORATION, CONDENSATION, PRECIPITATION and COLLECTION.  We watched several educational videos about the water cycle and also had to complete a labeling activity. Several confident thinkers in my class offered their one-sentence explanation of the words in focus. I put the best sentences on the board for the rest of the group to use. Next week we will continue to develop our understanding.

Miss Boramey supported the discussion about the water cycle at the girls' table.

Grade 3 In Class EAL Support

In Miss Lisa's and Mr. James' classrooms we do a lot of work with our English language learners. A great opportunity to practice using the academic language of our Water unit was when the kids had to share facts about water with their partners. 

Shintaro confidently shared his fact with his partner.

Maths time

Our big challenge last week was to create a mini-book about water with Mr.James' beginner students.

Lucas, Gunn and Shintaro read several easy books about water to collect information. We also made meaningful connections to the boys' background knowledge. As a result, our students created amazing books and were proud to present the reading that you can see below.





















In Miss Lisa's classroom we read a book "The Force of Water" and had a discussion about the features of the non-fiction book and the amazing facts that we learned from it. Our learning intention was to expand our collection of facts about water. We also worked hard with a small group of students to improve their spelling skills.

Our spelling class is fun!!

While the rest of the Grade 3 students were busy with the ISA test, EAL beginners from Miss Lisa's and Mr. James' classes enjoyed additional English language classes. We read and innovated stories, practiced some spelling strategies, asked and answered questions and of course played language games.

Yuzuka won our memory game!

Grade 3 In Class Support

In Miss Anita's room, we continued to practice our Daily 5 routines. The students have to read to someone, they have to read to themselves, they have to do some word work, work on writing and listen to reading. Our librarian Miss Rachell came to Miss Anita's classroom to teach the students how to find and work with interesting words while they read stories. 

While working in four groups Miss Anita's students practiced expanding their vocabulary.

In order to help our students to become independent learners, we focus on various strategies that help to develop their reading skills. While focusing on comprehension strategies our students were learning how to make connections.

Our group enjoyed making connections.

When it was our time to practice fluency the students read a story and recorded themselves using Ipads.

Jack and Chace are recording their own reading.