Does Kōtare actually enjoy reading?

 A couple of days ago I conducted a reading survey on my tamariki. I have a mixture of year 4, 5 and 6 students (mainly 5/6) and this years' cohort is at a lower academic level than previous years. They are all eager to please though and despite a choppy start with my attendance at school, they have settled in relatively well.

Getting to know your tamariki is key to their education. Knowing what they like, who they are, what they bring to your kopa is essential and being able to plan around this knowledge needs to be evidence based. This survey via Manaiakalani is one way to get to know who your tamariki are as readers. 

Prior to the survey I thought that my kids would not like reading nor read a lot. The exact opposite of myself. I read before I started school at 5 and read everyday - although the past couple of years had me put down fiction and pick up a lot more text style and science books. I am just getting back into reading fiction after the first day of RPI inspired me.

I had a battle with Google Sheets. As an experienced MS Excel user I find sheets frustrating. To add to that I lost part of my brain with covid two weeks ago and I am sorry to say that I have yet to find parts of it!! I struggled with putting the data into sheets and gave up with some graphs that made a great maths lesson for the kids on reading the results. So a win there as they had to figure out that things weren't in order column wise (and what was a column?) so they had to read carefully. They were fantastic and enjoyed the lesson both from a maths perspective and to learn from the data itself.

Kōtare's Reading Data

The results surprised me. I have one outlier who did skew some results. This tamaiti reads texts books for fun and scores in stanine 9 for everything in his year, and stanine 8 for the year higher. 

6 didn't read anything which was sad, but lower than I thought it would be. They generally fell on the "liked reading at school" side which was a relief, but looking at the individuals who didn't like reading at school it was the poorer readers which I felt for. 

I shared the titles of the books that they had as favourites and several were interested in trying reading the books that the others enjoyed so that was great. I will be starting a recommendation system in class where kids write reviews for others to read with the book and have it on display for others to see and perhaps be inspired to read.

Just under half the class does not have their own library card. Again, I was surprised that it was that high! I am getting forms from our mobile book bus that comes from our city library to school so that others can get one if they wish. I will encourage parents to sign them up. 

I wonder if some filled it in, in such a way in order to please me though. I hope not. These tamariki hunger for attention and love which as a role model for reading, I hope to influence them that reading is awesome and worthwhile.

Manaiakalani Reading Practice Intensive - Reading is Core to Learning - Day 1

In typical Vicki fashion, I managed to be sick on the first day of the course! But credit has to be given to the facilitators for their support and the interesting nature of their presentations -  I loved every minute of it.

It was great to go through and be reminded of what makes a good reader. I read before I went to school and was always supported by my whānau to read. I still read morning, noon and night and can't do without a daily fix of some reading or another. I love to learn and I found it easy throughout my school years. Not so for a lot of my class and I can see where I can shore up my practice to help pass on my absolute love of reading to my tamariki. My community is a small one deep in poverty and inequity and reading is one way of helping them to lift themselves up and out into the world and make great gains.

The pillars of practice make it "easy" to see where I need to focus my energy on in the classroom, and beyond.

In assessing where my tamariki are with their reading disposition, I already have data on what they like to read, when, where and how they feel about reading. But I have not yet done anything with it. I can see how I can now get their buy in as to what they can do to help themselves read more, and what I can do also. 

The exemplar reading slide with activities is a great resource. I already use some of these activities, but to see it laid out in both the younger and older reader levels was excellent. I will be endeavouring to use this format with my class as much as I can this term. I have levels from pre-emergent to 15/16 year old readers in my class although all seem to have a "helplessness" attitude with regards to learning that I am trying to overcome. This format will help make delivering my programme a lot easier.

I would also like to introduce a tuakana/teina reading group in the library at lunchtimes. I have a lot of tamariki that aren't into playground rough and tumble and spend time in the library. They love showing leadership and the teina are in awe of them. This will grow relationships across classrooms and the school and give a lot of tamariki the reading mileage they aren't currently obtaining.

I was sick the day of school three way parent/teacher/student interviews and will be rescheduling these after school in the coming weeks. I am now going to add some extra questions to my agenda about reading for the whānau. Maybe me getting covid was a blessing in disguise!