Preliminary Findings About The Nature and Extent of The Student Challenge

How important are gross and fine motor skills in relation to our cognitive processing? 

On a personal level, I realised the importance while doing 'boot camp. As I struggled to do a new 'activity modelled by the instructor that involved swinging a kettlebell around my body, crossing over arms and swinging it back the other way. Such activities take all my cognitive capacity to master. Is it just a coincidence that I have extreme difficulty in doing such activities when my peers can do it the first time, and that I struggle with sequencing letters within a word, words within a sentence or numbers within a string of numerals like phone numbers? How are gross motor skills related to cognitive functioning? 

Anecdotal observations of my students doing physical activity

As part of our schools work with Sport Auckland we had the opportunity to see our facilitator James model a series of physical games whereby I got the opportunity to take a step back and observe the students in my class move and work together in various ways.

There were two simple activities:

1. moving in different ways inside a space then getting into groups of a given number.

2. throwing bean bags to hit a cone in a relay-style activity.

These activities proved challenging for many of my students. Not surprisingly the students that found these activities challenging correlated with those students that were finding learning in the classroom difficult. 

I observed some students found gross motor skills such as marching, skipping, jumping with both feet, and throwing extremely difficult, for others it was working with others and problem-solving, and for two students it was joining in at all and they completely shut down and refused to participate. From the outside, it kind of looked like chaos. 

I hadn't anticipated these 'fun' activities would be such a challenge for my students and 'the wheels falling off' made me realise that I had been avoiding such activities, due to the 'difficulties it caused'. In my teacher management role of controlling the learning environment, I was doing my students an injustice by sheltering them and withholding vital opportunities to learn from doing. The limited PE opportunities I had been giving my students had not made me realise the skills my students needed in their development and how this correlated to their learning. 

In similar ways, my observations within the classroom show many of my students lack fine motor skills. For some using scissors to cut is extremely challenging, students are gripping crayons pencils and pens with their fists and just scribbling, people are drawn with a round body shape with sticks coming out for arms and legs with no head just dots for eyes and a line for a mouth within the body. 

Communication between students is also limited with some students using a few word utterances and not having the vocabulary to explain their understanding or how they are feeling. 

What is the significance of this in relation to the challenge of accelerating the development of the skills students need to be 'school-ready' within their first year of school?

If we are expecting our students to be 'school ready' we then need to be giving students the opportunity to develop the skills that are needed to be school-ready. How much of this am I currently doing in my day to address this need? What data can I gather to assess students developmental stages and measure progress? What can I do differently? 

Oral Language Workshop- Manaiakalani Teacher Only Day

 

Tools/Measures and Approaches

In my previous post, I identified the challenge my inquiry will focus on as accelerative learning of developmental skills students need to be 'ready for school'. Creating a programme for our Year 1 students that will fit their unique needs and that of our community.

There are many programmes out there each. Each programme has assessment tools that measure the skills that those programmes teach. As our students' needs are so diverse and we will be researching effective teaching from across a range of programmes to best meet the needs/cultures of our students. Therefore, we have decided to draw from a range of assessment tools/measures from across different programmes to best fit our student's needs.

From my preliminary findings through observations of students behaviours, I will identify key areas to measure student achievement using existing measures from existing programmes that teach that skill.

My next step is to observe student behaviours to find areas of development students find most challenging. From there I will look at assessment tools that measure this skill/area of development. I will then use these tools to measure progress as I change my teaching practice to meet the students' needs.

The Beginning of my Inquiry 2021

This post marks the official beginning of my inquiry for 2021. The actual beginning was an exciting conversation two weeks ago, between myself and our Principal.

The conversation was a future-focused discussion to gain insights from staff voice about our current reality, as part of our school-wide self-review process. It was also an opportunity to discuss a possible direction for my CoL inquiry fitting with our school's strategic plan and Manaiakalani's patterns of student learning.

Our conversation was prompted by the question;

Moving forward, looking to the future, how might we be better? Or How might we strengthen our School/practice?

As my former 2-year inquiry had focused on creating an intensive oral language programme for junior students I already had seen the importance of oral language for building literacy across the curriculum. However, starting a new year with Year 1 students I had become acutely aware that oral language was just one facet of developmentally being 'ready' to learn to read and write. Students need gross and fine motor skills, emotional and social self-regulation skills, oral language, visual, hearing and good health.

My informal observations of students this year showed these were areas our students found challenging.

Thoughts I have taken from our discussion:

• If we are to accelerate students achievement in Reading, Writing and Maths our students have to first be developmentally ready to read and write.
• Many students are starting school displaying development age levels of two and a half years to three and a half years. I feel that we are expecting these students to jump over key developmental stages and start reading and writing at the 'expected level' and 'progress rate' by throwing them into 'formal' reading and writing programmes instead of creating programmes that meet their developmental needs.
• There is urgency. If students are already starting school two and a half years behind their peers we need to find the most effective way to accelerate the developmental progress within their first year of school so that they are then ready to learn to read and write. If not, how can we be expecting to accelerate learning to meet the level of their peers further along in their schooling when our students are leaving the 'ready for school' starting blocks two and a half years later than the peers.
• There are lots of programmes out there however, our students, community, school is unique and we need to find what works for our students. We need to create a localised curriculum to meet our student's diverse needs.
• We have an exciting opportunity to create a localised curriculum for our Year 1 classes that meet the needs of our students and accelerates their developmental progress.
• The development of a curriculum programme to meet the needs of our students and accelerate developmental progress will take time to create effectively and sustainably. We will learn about our students and their specific needs, research effective practice that is already out there, create a model that suits our students, whānau and community and share our findings throughout this process.

Therefore, my focus for my inquiry will be 'Creating of an effective learning programme to accelerate the developmental progress of Year 1 students to establish skills for school readiness.