I have been pretty quiet on the blogging front lately but have been beavering away in the background with my class making our compulsory school current events homework more meaningful. The children have to research current events each week and report back to the class on their findings as part of their homework. Personally I would find it pretty pointless to have to do this and then only get to share it with a couple of friends, or have to sit through 25 other people sharing their current events so that we can all have a turn to share.... so TV23M news has been brought back to life.
Last year with Year 2 children we made several news reports - one covering a period where there was lots of storm damage around New Zealand and the other covering the Olympics. These were one off productions that took a significant amount of time to make.

This time we have a time limit - Friday mornings. We have 1.5 hours to make the whole thing and so far over the last 5 weeks we have met that deadline for everything except post production work. This year I am teaching a Year 3 class and it is fantastic to see the independent and responsible way the children have taken on their roles each week. Everyone has a part to play and the roles are shared round reach week. The roles so far are: Reporters, anchors, camera crew, musicians, artist, directors, post production people.

It is fantastic to see the improvement in speaking skills for the students in such a short period of time. Seeing themselves and their peers on video has increased student awareness of what makes a good speaker and how they can improve on this. Every student has now had at least 1 turn at being a reporter and our next step is for each person to set a personal goal to work on for their next report.

Parent and viewer feedback has been fantastic for this project and each week we have read all our comments and discussed ideas for changes to improve. YouTube statistics are also incredibly motivating for the children as we can see how many people have viewed each episode of the news. We have some great improvements planned for next term. Today was our last film session for Term 2.

Please take a look at our work so far and leave the children a comment to let them know what they do well and how they could improve. I am sure you will enjoy seeing the quality of our presentations improve week by week.

Episode 5
Episode 4
Episode 3
Episode 2
Episode 1

Assessment Overhaul?

Does anyone out there actually know with any certainty what we actually HAVE to assess in schools today? I am not wondering about the formative side of assessment as that is self explanatory.

But then there is the summative assessment that seems to be a continually growing mountain in some schools. The new curriculum says one thing but then it is said ERO expects other things and everyone within school also has their personal band wagon and opinion on what they think needs to be done.

At my school we have been lucky to have Professional Development with some prominent educational theorists over the past few years. We seem to hear all the extremes - from assessing everything you can possibly think of, to throw it all out and just be enthusiastic with the kids. No wonder it gets so confusing!!

I realise the purpose of Professional Development with theorists is to make us think and critique what we do, with the hope of purposeful teaching and assessing and perhaps some abandonment in the future, but how many schools is this a reality for?

What are you doing in your school? I would love to know. Do you assess inquiry skills, thinking skills, knowledge, all of the above?? How?

Feedback

I just have to share these blog comments which made me laugh at the imitation of my comments but also feel proud of the 6 year old child who spent time crafting this feedback for her peers. These comments were left on our class writing blog by one of the children in the class - she was working very hard and did it all in under half an hour. I did wonder why she spent all afternoon asking when I was going to moderate the comments - now I know she was so proud of what she had written! You will need to click on the photo to be able to read what she has said.

Comparing and Contrasting Planets

Today I had my class self assess and peer assess their statements about the compare and contrast maps they had made about 2 chosen planets. I had thought that after the children had self assessed it would be important for me to assess their statements as well to help teach them which level of SOLO Taxonomy they are working at but in hindsight I think I am wrong.
When I made my comments and shared them with the class I could see some hopeful faces looking very disappointed when I said they were not as high on the taxonomy as they had thought they were. It has made me wonder what the point is of me telling them what I think when they are capable of deciding for themselves and also assessing each others levels of thinking.
Anyway I have stopped leaving my comments and I am trying to puzzle through a better way to attack this. Maybe I should be leaving a comment with 2 stars and a wish to give the child some direction on how they could improve instead. Surely this would be more helpful for them and this is what I would do for any other piece of work that I was giving feedback on.

Space Solo

I have been using SOLO Taxonomy and Hooked on Thinking Maps once again this term to structure my inquiry unit. This time round it is so much easier for me to do as I feel more confident about my knowledge and experience with the maps and the assessment rubrics we built as a school. My class are also working confidently and independently with the maps as a result of the work we did with them earlier this year.

General Topic Overview:

Later in the term the children will be designing and building a model of a machine that can explore a chosen planet in space. To do this well they will have to be able to explain why the particular features on their machine are relevant to exploring their planet. (eg. Heat protection if it is a hot planet they have chosen to explore). The children will have to explain their design and justify the machine's features. They will also have to compare their machine to those designed to explore other planets and show why their design is unique to their chosen planet.

This is the way the inquiry has been structured so far...

Immersion - just the usual things to build student knowledge of space in general and build excitement for the unit.

Researching - Define Maps. The children worked in small groups to research a planet and create a definition statement for their planet. You can see their definitions as well as their self assessment of their statement based on our school assessment rubric for definitions by clicking on the links below. As a result of the definitions each child is now an 'expert' on one particular planet. This is the planet they will be building their machine to explore.

Here are the links to the children's definition statements and self assessments: Venus , Jupiter , Uranus , Saturn , Mercury , Mars

Analysing - Compare and Contrast Maps. Each expert worked with one other expert from their group and 2 experts from another group to compare and contrast their planets. The groups then wrote a statement about their map together and we are now in the process of self assessing and peer assessing these statements based on the assessment rubric.

Here are the links to the children's compare and contrast maps, statements and self assessments: Uranus vs Saturn, Mercury vs Jupiter, Venus vs Jupiter, Mars vs Saturn, Uranus vs Saturn

The next step today was to repeat this process in a smaller group - working with an expert on a different planet to themselves the children created another compare and contrast map. Tomorrow the children will write statements independently from their maps and these can be self and peer assessed. I am hoping I can use this data to comment on their reports about their thinking.

Watch this space for the next installment...