Blog 1: Inquiry into AOV goal

 Blog 1:

Accelerate the reading and writing progress of 19 identified students using structured literacy interventions so they are working at or above their expected year level by the end of the year.

What area of my practice do I need to work on changing in order to meet the needs of Pīwakawaka target children for reading and writing?

To meet the needs of my Pīwakawaka target children I am going to work on the following areas for reading and writing:

Reading:

1. Strengthening Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping

While your current strategy uses a "speech to print" concept—loading a known word before identifying phonemes—the new curriculum teaching sequences emphasize rigorous orthographic mapping.

• Practice Change: Move from oral phonemic awareness activities to teaching phonemes simultaneously with graphemes. Research cited in the curriculum indicates that connecting sounds to letters immediately leads to stronger reading outcomes than oral-only activities.

 This requires explicit instruction in identifying not just the first, but also the middle and last phonemes in three-phoneme words and immediately connecting them to print.

However: I need to be aware of avoiding cognitive overload.

Writing:

Goal-oriented talk: Use reflective and strategic communication to help tamariki describe their own learning, identifying what was "tricky" and what "helped," which builds the agency needed for them to see themselves as writers.

My top target group are all fairly capable now of writing two sentences, more help is required with the second sentence. Because I usually get them started on their picture and writing while I teach another group, they tend to interrupt a lot. With the use of a writing rubric I hope to be able to get them to peer reflect and check their own mahi before they come to me for the revision/edit process.

The rubric will support them to check that they have used a capital to start the sentence, a full stop to finish, spaces between words and that they have tried to use dominant sounds and also source words off their alphabet card.

I am also in the process of trialling a two-part picture plan to support them to get their two sentences down more independently.

In line with the AOV goals, I am hoping to push their spelling approximations out with more automaticity.

• Pīwakawaka (Year 1): Focus on moving students from identifying just the first sound to orally identifying the first, last, and middle phonemes in three-phoneme words and immediately connecting them to print.

• Also start to secure Kākano 3 digraphs to support reading and writing.

Another area to be aware of:

Reinforce Through writing (Reciprocity)

The curriculum notes that reading and spelling develop together. Ensure students are orally segmenting phonemes before they attempt to write them, which forces them to map the sounds they hear to the graphemes they are learning to form.

How do I use simultaneous mapping in Year 1?

To use simultaneous mapping effectively in Year 1, I must transition from oral-only phonemic awareness to instruction that connects phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters) at the same time. Research cited in the refreshed curriculum indicates that this immediate connection leads to significantly stronger reading and writing outcomes for novice learners.

Orthographic mapping for "sight" words

• Instant retrieval: Use mapping to help students store words in long-term memory for instant retrieval.

• Sliding sounds: Teach tamariki to decode by matching graphemes to sounds and saying them without pausing.

• The technique: Use continuous blending where students slide from one sound to the next (e.g., ssssaaaaat) until the entire word is sounded out. This helps them move from identifying isolated sounds to reading blended units effortlessly.

•  Irregular words: For high-frequency words that are not entirely regular, map the grapheme-phoneme correspondences as usual, but draw specific attention to the one or two "tricky" or unusual parts (e.g., mapping the /e/ sound to <ai> in "said").

Instructional pacing and bursts

• Brisk pacing: To maximize progress, introduce three-to-four English grapheme-phoneme correspondences a week.

• Short bursts: To avoid cognitive overload, mapping should occur in short, repetitive bursts of explicit teaching, such as daily whiteboard work and letter formation.

Potential issues:

Vanessa and I have both noticed that tamarki don’t seem to hear the distinct sounds when blending, nor do they hear individual words when reciting their sentence back - because we don’t “talk” with spaces so they hear it as a continuous stream, ie Iwenttotheshop. It sounds like one word.