Watching James and the Giant Peach

I have a Year 10 tutor class this year. The big percentage of them are boys. We did have a slightly more even balance of boys and girls last year but with students leaving and joining the class it is now mostly boys.
We have been told recently that the research is all showing that there is a gap between the literacy of boys and girls. As their tutor, I don't have a lot of time with them a day (20 minutes) but I wanted to try something. I had started watching episode one of James and the Giant Peach which os being read by Taika Waititi and friends. We also had a conversation about this in our department meeting. I decided to show the readings during morning tutor times. the episodes are a good length each to match the time of tutor periods.
There was some interest from the boys then they drifted into watching their own things and chatting. Then I noticed something. They were "watching, not watching", except for one boy, M, who was totally engrossed.
The next morning, it was "oh, are we watching that again?", but they still did the "watching, not watching" trick. You know what Y10 boys are like. Too cool for school. They were sneaky watching, again except for M, who was openly loving it and didn't care who knew.
The third morning, we had a great video to watch that was from Samoan Language Week. M's reaction as he came in was "are we not watching James and the Giant Peach today?", quite upset about it. We watched the lovely school video then onto our book episode.
I have made an effort not to watch ahead. I told the boys that I love it as I remember very clearly my junior school teacher reading it to our class, along with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I wanted my first viewing of this to be with the boys as they were seeing it. I love it. I love their sneaky watching, not watching reactions, I love M's open loving it.
Also, it was still on the screen when my Y13 class came in so one of my boys in Y13 got it up on his device and spent the whole double period watching it.
Can schools just hire Taika to read loads of books. The boys love it!


This photo is from the first morning when we had just started. The boys were still coming in during tutor so they weren't all there yet.

Here is the link to Partners in Health, the reason why Taika Waititi is doing this.

Here is the link to episode 1 on YouTube, the rest of the episodes can be found from there. We are up to episode 3.

Inquiry Question 3 - Tools, Measures and Approaches

Question 3


"Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools."

Analysis of results from previous years

Internals

Externals

This is to try and give me an idea where the weaknesses are in my own planning.

Analysis and breakdowns of ethnicity, achievements in previous years, in both DVC and other courses, literacy and numeracy abilities.

Know your learners blog post here

This is to get a general overview of who I have in the class.

Mindset questionnaire

Link to form here

This is to assess where the students think they are at with how they think about themselves and their work.

Last year I did an activity with my group - What do they want from my course

Blog post here

I want to do this again as it gave me a really good insight as to why they were in DVC in Year 13 and what they wanted to get out of being there.

To support all of this, I have already had a session with my group about why we are doing what we are doing in DVC and why it is changing.

Blog post here

I did this to keep the students in the loop about what was happening in the course. This was especially important to those students who have been in Level 1 and Level 2 DVC wiuth me as they will notice the changes more than the others.

Online support

I had started putting together online support videos for my group during COVID19 lockdown, especially for those who couldn't come online for classes with me. I really like these and have decided to continue doing them for the rest of the course.

Blog post here.

This is to give the students support when I am unable to sit with them one to one. It is a very busy class (Year 12 and Year13) and they are all at different points in their work.

Breaking Down my Inquiry for 2020

This year, the focus for my inquiry is my Year 13 class. I will be looking at ways to improve the standard of achievement for the whole class by focussing the planning for the 4 potential scholarship students.

Here is the breakdown of how I plan to do this.

Drawing Demonstrations While Engaging in Social Distancing

In my previous blog post, I explained how I have set my classroom up so it can be used safely during Level 2.

This is OK till I want to show them "stuff". Online stuff is easy as I can airplay to the HUGE TV I have in my classroom.  When I want to show them any drawing skills. I can connect up my webcam drawing board to the laptop and still send it over to the big TV so the students can see what I'm drawing. My usual method is to get the students round one desk and I show them drawing skills up close. We can't do this at the moment so my webcam is getting a good work out.

The other good thing about this method is the fact that I used Quicktime to show it through my laptop so I hit record while I did the demo. Easy peasy rewindable learning videos.

Back on Site - Level 2 Syle

I was SOOOOO excited this week. We were due back on site at school to teach. The week started with with an awesome staff meeting in the auditorium, where the chairs had been set up with enough space between them. We looked like a huge group of people who have been sent to the naughty chair!. It was so good to see everyone in the flesh.
We have a rolling start for our students. Y12 and Y13 in on Monday. Y11 on Tuesday, Y9 and Y10 on Wednesday then the whole school from Thursday onwards. It has been so good to see the senior students so far this week.
We have had to set our classrooms up in "exam style". Basically all separate desks with spaces between to ensure the correct social distancing. I wrote a blog post about the seating plans and drawing equipment boxes for the tables. 

Here it is in real life in the class. I had to put the tables on a diagonal as they were too close otherwise and I think I am going to have to swing the computer tables round so they are facing each other. Other than that though, it was an ok plan.

All staff were given a sanitation pack too so the students sanitise their hands as they come into the class and the tables etc get cleaned with the spray between classes. I don't think my tables have been this clean or been cleaned so often in their lives. We are a messy lot in my room.

As a warm up activity for my students to do so we didn't have to launch straight into our project work, they were all given paper and they got to play with the new drawing packs on the tables and get used to not moving round to get stuff like they are used to in my room.

Instructions (given out in stages with time in between) - 

Draw a square, 4 circles, a triangle, a squiggly line coming off from one circle .. etc ...etc...

Some of the instructions were about how they were feeling - draw a face on the cloud to show how you are feeling  - colour the cloud to show how you were feeling this morning - put some weather coming from the cloud to show how you feel about tomorrow.

These were interesting as they showed me the mixed feelings they had about coming back and how they are not looking forward to another couple of days of online teaching again till the whole school is back on Thursday.

I possibly am going to have to sew my sleeves into my pockets to keep me from hugging students. It is very hard. 

Preparation for being back in the class

I am very happy to be back at school next week in my classroom. To prepare for that I have been trying to work out my seating plans. I have big double sized tables so I'm thinking one student per end of table as they will be a metre apart then. The only problem is, I can't really picture how many of these I can fit in lines down my classroom. I normally have them in groups. I have done a roughish plan and put students names on desks ready but it might all be up for shuffling when I get in there on Monday and start moving the tables round only to find they don't fit the plan, especially on that right hand side. Never mind, I have online junior classes in the morning and don't see my in class seniors till the afternoon, so plenty of time for shuffling if needed.

I have also sorted out table boxes of equipment so the students don't have to get up and wander round for the stuff they need. When we are drawing normally, I have boxes of equipment in place in the room and the students move to get what they want when they need it. They can't do that at the moment so I have put together packs for each table. If they sharpen their pencils into the boxes, we will be having words!! I will include a paper cup to sharpen into.

Adding Extra Help for Students who can't get to Meets

I have been concerned about my senior students who can't get to online meets while we are on lockdown. I fully understand the various reasons for this (working being the main one), but I worry about how they will cope with being so far behind the students who have been coming to class when we get back to "normal".
My inquiry group are some of these students (my Y13 class) so I thought I would try something different.

I have added a page to the class site that is specifically for help with the individual aspects of the current project we are doing.
I have recorded myself talking about the different activities they have to complete and put up the example that I work through in the video for them to use as an example.

As of writing this blog post, I have only just started this so it is no where near complete. I have emailed the link to it to that class to get their feedback and to let them know it is there for them to refer to.

Link to page on class site.
Link to workspace - I have purposefully not put all of the activities on this workspace for this class yet as I have a couple of students who would try too much at once and they have enough to cope with. All of the activities are set up on the class site  and when we are ready, will be transferred to the workspace to aid tracking.

Teaching Online - Sketching

I wanted to do some drawing with my seniors. We have been working on Google docs etc for the whole time we have been on lockdown so we really need to get on with some drawn work. I have been doing some experiments on how to set this up - blog post here - and I decided to to use the webcam and paper and pencil.

Here is my set up for today.

I set up to do drawing with my Year 12 class P1 this morning where I want them to look at drawing design elements from their chosen design era. None of them turned up today (email conversations about the docs they are working on were going on through the session). I decided to run the session anyway and record it so it can be used to look back on and be rewindable,

There is not a lot of talking on this recording as I did not have any students in the online meet. There is more towards the end where I am describing what I have done. I looked at Arts and Crafts particularly as my most frequent visitor at Y12 chose this design era to look at.

For P2 I got three of my Year 13 boys come in and it was great to test the set up in a real situation to see how it went. This video is the lesson with the Y13 boys. Nothing really happens till about 5 minutes in when they start joining the class, just me scuffling about and then the drawing stuff starts about 9 minutes in. We focussed in on drawings skills today to warm us up as we haven't done any drawing in AGES. On the whole, the set up worked really well. The webcam has a few issues focussing sometimes but it is only a cheap one. I could try setting my camera up in a similar manner as it has the ability to be focussed. Sounds like an excuse to do more experiments!
As I said to the kids today. It was so good to hear the scratch of pencil on paper.

Using the Tinkercad Class Feature

I have used the Tinkercad class feature for the first time today. It's great. Really useful.
I have used Tinkercad a lot with my intermediate classes and to be honest, getting them to make their own accounts has always been a bit of a pain in the bum. As we are working / teaching / learning long distance from home at the moment, we didn't need this added stress so I thought I would give the class feature a go. Why didn't I try this before??

I put basic instructions of what to do on the class site and then realised that the Tinkercad class gives us a unique url to use to get tot he class. So that was even easier as I could put a button on the site for the students to click on. Then all they needed was the nickname in the class (Tinkercad just used their first names) and we are good to go.

There will end up being two buttons here after next week for two different classes, but this will be ok as they can only get in the class where their email is set up so it won't cause a problem.

It is easy to get to the classes that i have set up. It is just a button at the top of the page.

My two classes that I have set up so far are there. I have just tried it today with one. 

Then the really good thing is that i can see the work that have been doing on the dashboard, where I also have access to open the files too if I need to.

This is going to be a HUGE help over this working / learning / teaching from home period as I am planning on using 3d design with my Y9 and Y10 classes starting next week as we have new Technology rotation groups with our junior classes.

Thank you Tinkercad :D