Refining our Inquiry

During Term 2 we have worked on applying ideas and understanding gained through attending the Jill Eggleton Course.  This was really beneficial PD, even though some of our Team had attended a similar course previously, as the experience gave us all a common foothold on which to basis our ideas and hunches while trying out some approaches in our collaborative writing groups.

This Term we have had several meetings to confirm our target group.  It has been really beneficial clarifying our views of students needs and how these can be addressed.

In our final meeting we identified our Team Moana students who were working well below the National Standard.

After deciding that this group of students was too large for our Target Group we sorted these into a more manageable focus group.  We did this by discussing each student in turn and addressing their specific needs.  It very quickly became apparent that some trends started to appear e.g. poor spoken language structure, difficulty recording, specific learning issues.

The Target Group students that we have decided on are shown below. 

A secondary group also appeared and we will work to be very aware of these students in our learning environments.

Assessment has shown that some children struggle to write a proper sentence and find punctuation challenging. Sentences structure often reflects poor understanding tense as children change from past tense to present tense verbs.
How do children know what is a sentence? How do we teach these skills?

Our research focus will be:

Rachel - How can technology best be used to support struggling writers?

Sonya and Janet - What oral language opportunities and learning experiences can be used to best support struggling writers?
Sonya is going to look at children working on collaborative buddy writing.
Janet is keen to teach sentence structure and also do some research on Story Telling.