Otago Literacy Symposium

On Tuesday 24th April, I was fortuanate enough to attend the Otago Literacy Symposium. https://sites.google.com/silverstre.am/otagoliteracysymposium2018/home?authuser=0

The key note speaker for this was Gail Loane. I found her talk to be extremely interesting, and my take home point from her talk was that in order for students to excell in writing they need authentic context.

I also attended 3 different workshops that I found really interesting as well

The first workshop was run by Joan Turner, and was on: Guided reading with fluent readers years 4-8 : keeping it simple. Joan was a literacy lecture at the Otago TC, and is currently contracted to run BT and Mentoring courses. I was fortunate to have completed one when I was at St Marys.

In her workshop she shared different ways of getting high achieving students engaged in guided reading groups, and ways of encouraging deeper thinking from them. One simple way which I am planning on implementing in my reading programme is the way I ask questions of my students. As Joan said "Being asked to Think about a text just read is different to being asked to recall a text being read.

She also said to encourage the students to talk to each other about the text, rather than to me, and this also increasing higher order thinking.

The second workshop was run by Deidre Senior and was titled: Raising Writing Achievement the Waitaki Valley Way. Deidre is the principal at Waitaki School, and the school has been involved in the ALL programme. She talked about what had been successful in their programme. I like how she had her target group write a children's book and then they published it using Snapfish. I will look into doing something like this for my ALL group. She also talk about taking the Writing out of Writing and again to look at different opportunities for the students to share their writing. I think this will tie in well to the use of Seesaw which I am going to be implementing into my class this coming term

The third workshop was also run by Deidre Senior" Fizz, bang pop! Using Science and Technology to Spark Literacy.

Again I found this really interesting. Waitaki School have also been involved with PD involving Vicki Collett, so I found some of the information she was sharing very similar. What I did really enjoy with this workshop was seeing different experiments that I can use for my class.

This Experiment involved having a jar filled as tall as you can with water, then dropping paper clips in one at a time into it. This experiment shows water tension, and you can discuss meniscus with the students. 

In this experiment one balloon had water in it, the other didn't. The balloons where then held over a knacked flame until it popped. The ballon with the water didn't pop, as it the water inside kept the surface area of the balloon cooler.