Where's the evidence for my TI?

My focus group for 2018 was 5 boys :

2 x Cook Island Maori students, 1 x Fijian, 1 x Tongan and 1 x Maori.

EVIDENCE:  

 I looked at the 2017 term 4 reading results and found that the students were at the following reading levels:

2 reading at 9 - 9.5 yrs, 2 reading at 8.5 - 9 yrs and 1 reading at 9.5 to 10 years.

In addition the WFRC report back for our school showed that the levels of boys in general were lower than the cohort of the country.

My Teaching Inquiry for 2018

It didn't take much deliberation to determine that I need to focus on reading with my class. Keeping the school goals in mind and the achievement challenges of Manaikalani  Col, my inquiry hypothesis is:

If I use specific strategies in reading with my focus students, to what extent does it help

the boys in my class to lift their achievement in Reading?

2018 - A New Year, A New Challenge!

Reading makes the world go round, or so I presume.  This year my teaching inquiry will be focused on the boys in my class who are reading below their chronological age.

WHY?

I wanted to see how I could help the boys in my class lift their achievement in reading.  This resulted as a report back by the WFRC which showed that the reading levels of the boys in general, at our school, were lower than the cohort of the country.

NEXT STEP?

The research I guess.  What does make students improve their reading?

Vocabulary- Prefixes

Did additional work on prefixes so students use these prefixes rather than not e.g. unhappy instead of not happy.

Prefix	Meaning	3 words	Images
non	from, down, away reverse, opposite	Decode, decrease, deduce	decrease
mis	wrongly, badly, unsuitably	misplaced, misunderstood, misfortune	misplace
in	middle, surround, within	incorrect, inheritance, inflatable	incorrect
pre	before, previously	previous, precise, predator	predator
pro	professional, experienced, advanced	professional, protein, property	protein
il	Adjective, describing	illegal, illustrator, illusion	illusion
de	down, away, remove	degrees, dentist, define	degrees
ex	Not including	Example, expert, exchange	exchange

Root words

Today for vocabulary we studied root words. The students had difficulty working out the root word when we did the word of the day.

Root Word A root word has no prefix or suffix — it's the most basic part of a word.	Meaning	Words with the root word
act	verb:do something noun: a deed or pretence	Action, actor, actress
form
port
Auto
audi
graph
tele
photo
path
omni
mit

Vocabulary Building- Time

To begin the lessons on time I started with the vocabulary. I introduced International Timeline and International Date line  amongst other words. For consolidation students made word clouds and then posted on their blogs. During the course of the week I heard these words being used during problem solving.

Round Robin Writing

Tried round robin writing yesterday for the first time. The students enjoyed it..were so enthusiastic. It was good to see all students contributing to the writing. Also the help given by co members to improve or clarify ideas. The downside was that a few stories lacked sequence or was a bit immature. The students complained was that the 5 minutes given to write was too short.  I will try this type of writing again with 7 minutes  for writing.