My inquiry over the last two years has been to grow student's oral language through an intensive oral language programme implemented across our junior school.
One of the main changes to our teaching has been 'hands-on tasks' whereby the students talk about what they are doing as they do it, using vocabulary and phrases modelled by the teacher.
Moving into lockdown has made me and my team think about how this could look using a digital platform.
Some other challenges we were facing:
- Engaging students in their learning, with feedback from parents that they were finding it hard to get their children to focus on their learning at home.
- The age of the students as they are too young to follow written instructions, we needed learning activities to be easy for them to understand, independently, without needing help from an adult.
- Not knowing if students were connecting with the leaning site at home as it has been hard to contact some families.
- Videos shared with me via email, often through older siblings show engagement and connecting with learning online.
- Videos show children talking about what they are doing.
- They have understood the instructions and learning about concepts and contexts outside of their daily worlds.
- Use of correct sentence structures as they teach others how to do the activity.
Here are some examples of moving our intensive oral language acquisition programme online...
'Theory proposed by Krashen is that we acquire language through hearing and reading and it happens subconsciously.' This is exactly what your children are doing. They are involved in a process of making a trap, they listen to you and then make their own traps and narrate the process of making their traps. What an awesome way of developing conversational and academic language proficiency through content. Well done Jo.
ReplyDeleteThanks Archana, I think videoing themselves gives them a safe platform to practice language too. This is something I'm definitely going to carry over when we are back at school. Also being able to playback the video would mean they are hearing the language multiple times.
DeleteI agree with the subconsciousness of developing language in this way.
Thank you for the link to the work of Krashen... The perfect reading I needed.
Hi Jo!
ReplyDeleteGoing through your daily plans on your class site for Home Learning, I can absolutely testify that you have been doing a fantastic job of implementing this inquiry focus through digital tools during this challenging time of learning from home. Your versatile, child-friendly, fun and relevant videos, your audio instructions of the lessons, and lots of visuals you use in your lesson plans definitely help children to easily connect with the language experiences, enriches their vocabulary knowledge and encourages them to develop their oral language.
Well done, Jo.
It is a great pleasure to work with you. I am very grateful for the knowledge and experience you bring to our team as our Junior Team Leader, and I appreciate how much I have been learning from you.
Thank you.
Thank you Laadan. I feel extremely proud to be working within an amazing team of dedicated teachers. It is super exciting to be looking at new ways to engage our students and grow their vocabulary knowledge during the Covid period and having you guys to bounce ideas off is amazing. I feel this experience has again lit our teams fire regarding our oral language focus and the connections we are making with our whānau is key to the opportunities for changes that can happen this year.
DeleteThank you for your support and for being onboard this journey into accelerating our students oral language acquisition.
Hi Jo,
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to say I am really enjoying the learning and take aways from your blog and Inquiry. I have been at the reflecting stage of my inquiry to use a more hands on approach to writing, provide feedback and increase oral language opportunities. I'd love the opportunity to have a chat, perhaps a google hang out with you.
Hi Anita
DeleteWould love to chat over hangouts or go for a coffee.
Lets connect this week and make a plan.
Hey Jo, So cool to see your learners engaging in online learning around their PEST unit. So cool to see prototyping and students engaged with the practical create tasks. Welldone!
ReplyDeleteThanks Lou,
DeleteIt will be exciting to see what influence our move to 100% online learning will have on our practice now we are back in the classroom. Exciting times.