What do 'The 31' enjoy reading?

Today I interviewed 18 randomly selected Year 9 students from "The 31" - the 31 Tamaki College Year 9's who made above-average gains in reading last year.
One of the questions was "What do you enjoy reading?"
So here you go, straight from the mouth of babes:

CoL Blog 4

My wrist is still sore so more handwriting!
I didn't crop this because I thought it was quite artistic!

CoL Blog 3

CoL Blogs 1 and 2

I injured my wrist over the holidays and typing irritates it so here's my handwritten blog post:

Week 10, Term 1

Goals:

To make time for my mental and physical health. 
To carry out all my roles (teacher, HSA director and Across Schools CoL) to the best of my ability. 
To support staff wellbeing. 
To actively maintain a positive personal outlook.

• Visits to the gym this week: Monday night between SAC days because I wasn't stressed about the second SAC day and didn't need to prepare anything, and Saturday morning with hubby.

• McDonald's eaten: One mental-health stop for a Cookie Time McFlurry and small fries after a particularly difficult day. It was worth every single calorie. 

Image stolen from the internet

• Casual sports games played this week: None again, but 5-a-side touch starts next week. It will be a chilly season!

• Books read: I've started to read The Madonna's of Leningrad by Debra Dean. It's only rated 3.8 stars on Goodreads, but I'm enjoying it a lot. It jumps back and forward in time between Marina's experiences in Russia during early WWII and her present life as she struggles with dementia. 

• Teaching highlights: 


• The teaching highlight of my week was the total silence that occurred for about 3 minutes during the Year 9 double-period Reading Comprehension this Thursday. It was beautiful. The sound of concentration. Everyone was engaged in ReadTheory, or answering comprehension questions, or producing a DLO. I have never, NEVER had a Y9 class have complete engagement like that before, and I wonder if it was in part caused by the repeated structure of the reading lesson across 4, now 5, weeks. 

• CoL things:  
• I still need to go and interview Y9 students who made accelerated gains in reading during Year 8, but this Monday/Tuesday they have Y9 camp so alas, that must wait till next term! 
• I continued to visit Primary schools to share my booking sheet, and had my first booking! 
• I'm going to visit Robyn at Panmure Bridge on Monday about her upcoming space unit. We had our first TC CoL teachers meeting with Soana and Russell and established how we will share with staff, and run the cluster 'Create' session at Tamaki College next term.

• HSA things: SAC conferences went fairly well with 7 of 11 parents coming in with 6 of 11 students. One parent is interested in being on the BOT, so that is very exciting. I'm sure they would do a lovely job.

• Teacher well-being support: alas, I was off sick on Friday.

• Gratitude emails sent: one to Graham, to thank him for his amazing work planning the Goat Island trip and opportunity for students to compare Pt England reserve with a beautiful marine reserve. He worked to really short deadlines and planned a large trip for half of Year 10, and kept them safe in the water while they were there. Students (and supervising teachers!) had a fantastic EOTC experience, and I think he is in part responsible for the number of applications I received from Y10 students to attend a Science day at AUT in the holidays! #makingsciencegreatagain Thanks Graham. 

Week 9 - The End is Nigh

Goals:

To make time for my mental and physical health. 
To carry out all my roles (teacher, HSA director and Across Schools CoL) to the best of my ability. 
To support staff wellbeing. 
To actively maintain a positive personal outlook.

• Visits to the gym this week: Thursday night between HSA Leadership camp days, when I felt stress-free enough to take an hour for myself.

• McDonald's eaten: Three trips again. None this coming week, I promise.

• Casual sports games played this week: None AGAIN - and it's starting to just slightly affect my self-esteem now as I feel I put on weight when I don't play during the week.

• Books read: No books but I read a magazine article for fun about Duchess Meghan Markle. She seems so sweet :)

• Teaching highlights: 


• Year 12 are writing their assessment so there is little exciting happening there.. 
• I only taught Y9 once last week because of the HSA trip on Thursday and Friday, and that period was just a massive uphill battle on Period 6 to get them to write compare/contrast paragraphs about hokey pokey that we made Friday P6 the week before, and lava/pumice. I had even taken the time to record their instructions, so the low-reading-level students could listen and still be able to learn:

• Year 13 have been stretching their brains and wrestling with the concept of Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) analysis near the end of their learning about selective breeding. We had a nice double-period of slowly moving through a video, creating brainstorms, and sitting together in small groups and talking. It wasn't a particularly inventive lesson, just patient and collaborative. 

• CoL things: Half of my COL time this week was taken by an HSA directors meeting. I still need to go and interview Y9 students who made accelerated gains in reading during Year 8, but this Monday/Tuesday we have student achievement conferences and next Monday/Tuesday they have Y9 camp so alas, that must wait till next term! I will try to conduct some research into more reading comprehension interventions I can implement with the class :)

• HSA things: Period Zero numbers dropped last week back down to 5, but I am hopeful that after the Student Achievement Conferences these numbers will increase. 
• I took the class to a two day Leadership Conference on Thursday and Friday, which was undoubtedly the highlight of their week (and my teaching-week too)! There, students met other Y11's who will be travelling with them through secondary and into Health Science training at University. Here is the video from the trip:

• Teacher well-being support: this week I taught 7 staff members how to make scones! Glynis even went home and made some more over the weekend and sent me pictures :)

Showing the way of the scones..

Ladies ready to bake! (Alex taking the photo).

Glynis' weekend scone attempt - looking fluffy!

• Gratitude emails sent: back to none again. Oops. 

Week 8 recount

Goals:

To make time for my mental and physical health. 
To carry out all my roles (teacher, HSA director and Across Schools CoL) to the best of my ability. 
To support staff wellbeing. 
To actively maintain a positive personal outlook.

• Visits to the gym this week: Absolutely none in the week and it's taking a toll on my back, which is starting to get sore. So I made it a priority to go to the gym twice in the weekend. 

• McDonald's eaten: So. Much. McDonalds. At least 3 times. 

• Casual sports games played this week: None, and again, not moving around and sitting on my computer doing school work has started to have an impact. 

• Books read: Finally finished Mud, Sweat and Tears. I'm going to record myself reading it out loud for Stanley to listen and read along with. The story is really inspiring and I think he'd enjoy it.  

• Teaching highlights: 


•  Reading went really well with 9PKr last week. Students worked in three groups and moved through rotations of Read Theory, group reading and discussion with me, and creating their DLO's (although still not many students made it that far, reading took so long!) 
• During the double-period reading Dot and some guests from Bahrain came through to observe, and Dot kindly shared a short video she took of us reading during the period:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1965Gds4rfdyV9qJpbtdrd5Fjd0KjGXn-/view?usp=sharing
• The reading that we did this week was about Lake Taupo - its volcanic and mythical past. The reading activities are here, and the DLO outline is here.


• As always I changed the reading for the Ōkoki group, and this includes a video reading and oral questions that can be discussed (see below):

• Last week was also the annual forest field trip for Year 12, which is always a nice day out with the class. Rebekah particularly enjoyed it and said "that was even better than the zoo!" Other choice comments included "man I can definitely get Excellence in this!"

Looking at a tree.

Jean explaining how Nikau berries are adapted to attract the birds that disperse their seeds.

Footprints from an inquisitive mammal.. can you guess what it is? I'll tell you next post!

•  I also really enjoyed a lesson about inbreeding, outbreeding and genetic diversity with Year 13 where they split into groups and each presented case studies to the class.

Check out their presentations here:

Inbreeding horses

European Royalty

Florida Panther

• CoL things: Last week I attended three primary school's staff meetings to introduce myself and share my booking sheet. The moment of time to catch them is when they're planning their Science Inquiry topic term! I imagine that I'll be not busy for a while, and then towards the end of the term when people begin looking ahead I could be inundated with requests for help! 

• HSA things: Period zero ran with an increased number of students - up to 7 this time! 

• Teacher well-being support: last week was a 'juice tasting' - competitive, of course. 5 teachers came and joined me in guessing the colour, variety, country of origin, region, and descriptors that matched the words describing the flavour on the label of the 'juice.' 
• I joined in with teachers participating in the #hijabforhumanity:

• Gratitude emails sent: ONE! - to Carol because she let me run with my crazy, VERY last-minute hokey-pokey making idea. I approached her on Thursday to see if she would allow me to use T1 for the practical, and she said "YEAH of COURSE!" She even measured out and prepared all the ingredients so the lesson would run more quickly and smoothly. It was a fabulous period 6 science lesson and the kids really enjoyed doing something practical.
• For anyone wondering, the instructions are below.
• I think it is important that we spend one more lesson going over what a model is in science, and what the science of making hokey pokey actually was: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K0DBl0XkWVK2Qs_qJtftYiSCbbGFgBHfwl_wR4ip9yM/edit?usp=sharing