Student voice and evaluations

I have been fortunate to spend time at Panmure Bridge work with Robyn Anderson in her Year 7 & 8 class. She asked me to interview her students about their learning.
This was an amazing experience to hear these students describe their own learning, achievement and challenges. 
Some of the positive comments where :

• To hear students referring to specific strategies eg skimming, scanning, inferring etc
• Identifying specific skills they need to learn eg my times' table to help me solve problems faster.
• Recognise what they had just learnt or achieved eg adding decimals.

Please see Robyn's informative post here

Robyn gets her students to complete an evaluation and the end of every term, I have linked her blog post here.


At Sommerville, we have been working on our students understanding their learning goals and being able to recognise if they have achieved their goals

Our students need visual supports to help understand their learning goals.

What am I learning?

What do I need to do?

What do I think?

How well did I do?

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC)

What is AAC?


Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is an umbrella term that encompasses the communication methods used to supplement or replace speech or writing for those with impairments in the production or comprehension of spoken or written language.

•  Augmentative – add;  Alternative – another option

•  AAC includes all forms of communication (other than oral speech) that are used to express thoughts, needs, wants, and ideas. We all use AAC when we make facial expressions or gestures, use symbols or pictures, or write. 

Our role is to be a communication partner. This is a very important role, one that will help our students. What we do counts; what we think is important; how we respond matters; every interaction is an opportunity to grow language and communication.
Some of our learners need additional support with their communication skills and AAC can support their production of speech and their comprehension of another person's language.
Examples of AAC :

- used at Sommerville Special school -  Gail Arriola-Bagayas  SLT.

We use the term AAC to describe various methods of communication to get around problems with ordinary speech. Some kinds of AAC are actually part of how everyone communicates: for example, waving goodbye; giving a “thumbs up’ instead of speaking; pointing to a picture, or gesturing in a foreign country.

However, people with speech difficulties have to rely on AAC most of the time. Some AAC tools “add on” to verbal communication – simple methods such as pictures, gestures and pointing. Some people need more complex help to communicate, such as powerful computer technology.

We can best support our learners using Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) by creating a learning environment where they are immersed in the use of their own communication system. Modelling with AAC involves highlighting (pointing to or activating) symbols in an AAC system as we speak so that students can experience how their AAC system can be used to communicate for real reasons. Modelling AAC may also be referred to as Aided Language Stimulation or Aided Language Input. 

Wellbeing Strategy

Ministry focus on Wellbeing.

I attended the Inclusive Education Seminar where Dr David Wales National Director Learning Support Ministry of Education discussed the Learning Support Directions.

David presented the Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy.

Resources and Initiatives available to support student well being.

Additional resources

Wellbeing tools

Student wellbeing

Wellbeing ERO

Positive Behaviour for learning

Using Physical restraint in schools.

Assessment - looking deeper

Criterion Assessment

Criterion Teat of Basis skills

The primary emphasis of this assessment is on phonetic word attack skills.
It uses a multiple- sensory assessment strategies to ensure that visual and auditory receptive skills, as well as vocal and motor expressive skills, are tapped.

Sample pages from the test book.

This test allows students to respond in many ways. I have adapted this test and used with non - verbal students.

It includes Letter recognition, Letter sounding, Blending and Sequencing, Phonics patterns, Multi syllable words, sight words.


I carried out this assessment on our target group of students in Year 7 & 9 at Panmure Bridge school.
It clearly showed where the gaps were in their phonics knowledge.

Student view of the own learning.

While working with many students across the Manaiakalani schools I have noticed many of the students are very critical of themselves and their own ability.
They seem to give up quickly and believe before they have even started that the task is going to be too hard.

When reading Karen Ferguson blog post about her students self-talking and the possible impact this could be having on your students, it made me revisit this possible challenge for our students. 

We need to get our students to rewrite the messages in their heads so that they are not giving up or being negative about their abilities and their learning.

I think the Stonefields school Learning pit helps students understand that learning can be hard and that is ok! But we need to be determined and positive and keep going.
The visual representation of the Learning pit works well and students in our Sommerville Satellite class at Stonfields now understand these concepts when matched to a visual and situation.

These learning qualities are so important for all our students. We all know learning is challenging and sometimes we just want to give up! We need to show students how to be Self Aware, and determined. Self Efficacy needs to be a skill we gift our students.

Let's put the CREATE - in Learn Create Share

DID YOU KNOW?

Drawing activities allow students to explore color, line curvature, length and direction, how lines can be used to draw shapes and shapes can be combined in different ways to make patterns and represent people, animals and objects.

Drawing helps children to develop the  visual-spatial skills needed for mathematics. Pattern making is also an important aspect of developing mathematical ideas in young children.  

Fine motor activities and handwriting tasks

As a student performs handwriting exercises, you will begin to notice a difference in their  visual perception and fine motor development.

Additional benefits may include the following:

• You will be able to identify fine-motor problems                     
• You will improve tracking, retention and pencil grip                  
• You will help your child establish dominance
• You will improve their visual-motor skills, crossing the midline and hand-eye coordination
• You will provide more opportunities for sensory-motor development.

Music

Music engagement is an excellent way to encourage brain development in our students. Music has the ability to activate many different areas of the brain at once, such as areas associated with language, memory, hearing, and areas used to process sensory information. 

Music  is an excellent way to do educational activities in a fun and motivating way.

I have personally witnessed several times student who really talk or have communication challenges begin to sing.

Music can help stimulate your student’s brain in different ways, dance can help develop fine motor skills, and drama teaches emotions and problem-solving. 

Dance is important in education. The acts of imitation, repetition, coordination, and exploration of movement to the rhythm of the music will promote memory training and coordination.

Learning routines and memorising moves is a good mental exercise for your child. It’ll encourage them to use their mental strength without necessarily realising it. Dancing is a great way to help develop your child’s brain and ignite the spark of creativity 

Dancing, and other forms of art, can be used as tools of expressions and exploration for our students. They can use their creativity to think through misunderstanding, and communicate understanding effectively, even though they may not know how to use their words. 

Let's extend our students learning and CREATE.

Engaging our Learners in an active way

If you present new content to your students in multiple
creative ways, using different types of media, and medium
three amazing things happen:

• more students will be able to access and learn the content
• you’ll reinforce new information more effectively than ever
• your students will become expert learners—meaning they’ll know how to explore a wide range of ways to learn, and they’ll understand which strategies work best for them.

Auditory discrimination

Auditory discrimination is the ability to recognise differences between sounds. Particularly, auditory discrimination allows people to distinguish between phonemes in words. Phonemes are the smallest parts of sound in any given language.

Phonological awareness is often referred to as phonemic awareness, but there is a crucial difference between these terms. 

The term ‘phonemic awareness’ comes from the word ‘phoneme’, which is a single sound in language.   This includes the following individual skills:

·        Identification of initial, final and medial sounds in word

·        Segmentation (breaking words into individual sounds)

·        Blending (blending individual sounds to make words)

·        Phoneme transposition (ability to ‘swap’ sounds)

The term ‘phonological awareness’ comes from the word ‘phonology’, which is the sounds and sound patterns of language.  Phonological awareness is therefore a broader term than phonemic awareness and encompasses the following:

All of the above aspects of phonemic awareness   PLUS

·        Onset + rime

·        Rhyme

·        Syllabification

·        Word Retrieval

·        Auditory discrimination

Visual Sequential Memory

Visual Sequential Memory is the ability to remember visual details in the correct sequence.

• This is essential for spelling and reading, where your child needs to remember the sequence of letters in order to spell the word correctly.
• When doing multiple digit addition and subtraction, visual sequential memory is essential to help your child copy the numbers in the correct order.

Visual sequential memory is the ability to remember forms (including shape, orientation, size, and colour) or characters in the correct order. This skill is particularly important in spelling. Missing, added or jumbled letters within words are common for people who struggle with this skill, and they will often whisper or talk aloud as they write. Recognising and remembering patterns may also be a problem.

Improved sequential memory can help improve your child’s reading skills. To do this effectively, both auditory sequential and visual sequential memory skills need to be developed. Auditory sequential and visual sequential memory skills are the ability to remember things seen and heard in sequence. This plays an important role in learning to remember the difference between words such as on and no and being able to complete tasks in the order they were given.

This is not only vital for reading, but for spelling and mathematics as well. As you can imagine, saying 91 + 1 or 19 + 1 , spelling t-a-r instead of r-a-t, or reading dog instead of god could completely change the meaning of a situation.

Is lack of visual tracking skills getting in the way of your learners progress?

I have recently been testing some students who are struggling in reading and writing.
My detailed testing has shown that they struggle with visual tracking and scanning.

Vision and visual tracking are activities that happen automatically without us really focusing on it.  The brain recognises our eyes are moving, tracking, scanning, focusing, pursuing, and accommodating without us even realising.  

What is Visual Tracking?

Visual tracking is often defined as the ability to efficiently move the eyes from left to right (or right to left, up and down, and circular motions) OR focusing on an object as it moves across a person’s visual field. This  is important for lots  of our daily activities, including reading, writing, using scissors, drawing, and playing.  

Researchers says that the  typical development of visual processing, the ability to visually track objects emerges in children around the age of five.  

Difficulties in Visual Tracking

Your learning might have difficulties in some of the following areas if they have challenges with visual tracking:

• Losing place when reading.  Re-reads or skips words or lines.  
• Omits, substitutes, repeats, or confuses similar words when reading.
• Must use finger to keep place when reading.
• Poor reading comprehension.
• Short attention span.
• Difficulty comprehending or remembering what is read.
• Confusion with interpreting or following written directions.
• Writing on a slat, up or down hill, spacing letters and words irregularly.
• Confusion with left/right directions.
• Persistent reversals of letters (b, d, p, q) when naming letters.
• Errors when copying from the board or book to paper.

Formal testing is required to determine if they is a visual tracking or scanning issue.



Visual perceptual skills require the ability to see, organize and interpret visual information.  Visual tracking is one type of visual perceptual skills.  Visual tracking is the ability to control the eye movements using the oculomotor system (vision and eye muscles working together). There are two types of visual tracking: maintaining your focus on a moving object and switching your focus between two objects.

Possible activities to support our learners:

Activities to promote eye tracking:

• Complete puzzles.
• Word finds
• Find as many things as you can see of a certain shape (circle, square, rectangle, triangle) in the room.
• Copy a series of motor movements made by someone else.
• Perform dot-to-dot pictures.
• Find the mistakes in “What’s Wrong with this Picture?” pictures.
• Sort playing cards in different ways (color, suit, number), or use playing cards to find two with matching numbers.
• Solve mazes.
• Play “I Spy.”
• Play balloon toss.
• Use tracing paper to trace and color simple pictures.
• Perceptual motor programmes 

Reading strategies

Guiding our learners through Reading

Reading strategies for our students.

Here is a copy of some of the planned strategies I am using with students working at Blue level (5 1/2 to 6 years) based on ideas from Sally Clendon. We are reading the same book each day for four days but for a different purpose. The students have other opportunities to read different reading material at other times during the day.

Our sensory system

I have had several people ask me about some of their students and why they react to certain smells, sounds and textures or have limited body awareness.

Are you aware our body has 7 sensory systems that help us understand the world around us? Some of our students have sensory ways give mixed messages.


We have 7 different sensory systems that our brain must integrate in order to interact appropriately with our environment. These sensory systems include: proprioception (muscle-joint awareness), vestibular (orientation in space), tactile (touch), auditory (sound), visual (sight), gustatory (taste), and olfactory (smell). Our brain works hard to integrate all of those sensations without becoming too overwhelmed, distracted, or disengaged.

Even things that don’t seem “sensory” actually are. Take handwriting, for example. In order to write, your brain must integrate a huge amount of sensory information: to remain upright in the chair (proprioceptive sense), to hold the pencil with an appropriate grasp using the appropriate force (tactile and proprioceptive senses), to form the letters appropriately with adequate spacing (visual and vestibular senses), to sustain endurance throughout the activity (vestibular and proprioceptive senses), to filter out distracting input (auditory senses).


Children (and adults) with sensory processing disorders (SPD) manage sensory input in ways that are not functional, meaning they interfere with their daily activities.

http://momentousinstitute.org/blog/making-sense-of-sensory-processing

Functions of behaviour

Early literacy.

Early literacy research states that:

• Early literacy development is a continuous developmental process that begins in the early years;


• Early literacy skills develop in real-life settings through positive interactions with literacy materials and other people.


Therefore a broad, deep and rich curriculum as advocated should ensure an environmentally rich literacy context, which gives children many opportunities for:


• Movement and developmentally appropriate experiences of both large and fine motor skills;


• Exploration of three dimensional props and books; 

• Real experiences of books, rhymes .

The development of early language and literacy begins in the first three years of life and is closely linked to a child's earliest experiences with books and stories. Young children come into contact with a range of materials including books, paper, and crayons. Together with the adults in their lives they are the important building blocks for language, reading and writing development. Current research demonstrates the critical role of these early experiences in shaping brain development.


For our students who have complications in the early years, whether that be medical issues, complex family dynamics or other situation that have limited the normal development of language we need to find ways to build on their language development. Opportunity is needed to build their developmental stages and experiences before we expect these learners to gain an understanding of formal literacy.


Views on learning literacy:


Learning to communicate and to read has changed dramatically and most recently due to digital technology. Vygotsky (1987) states that learning is a social phenomenon and emphasises that the learner must be involved in the whole activity as a meaningful context rather than discrete parts. This view supports the holistic approach to learning literacy based upon the fundamental assumption that reading and writing are learnt from whole to part (Goodman, 1986); (Goodman and Goodman, 1979). Learners should understand and experience the purposes and functions of language before learning to manipulate its constituent parts. Oral and written language have to be learned in meaningful and enjoyable circumstances, and thus children construct language as they use it. So in holistic approaches the child has the lead and the approaches vary between individuals in multiple contexts and via multiple interpretations. Harste et al., (1984), Cambourne and Turbill (1987) suggest that certain conditions support this approach with children, such as immersion in print, demonstration of how print and books are used, and encouraging children to explore through approximate and practical ways of using reading and writing meaningfully whilst giving supportive and instructive feedback.

Effective in teaching.

My latest professional reading has lead me to:

"What Really Works in Special and Inclusive Education : Using evidence-based teaching strategies. Using evidence-based teaching strategies. David Mitchell.

In the Introduction David Mitchell talks about the  UK evidence that  shows teachers who are effective in teaching disadvantaged learners demonstrate skills in a 'bundle' of strategies.

At Sommerville Special School we talk about having "lots of tools in our tool box". Students with additional needs are still unique individuals with their own complex learning needs. While there is a lot more research around on best teaching practice for students with specific identified disabilities, each student is still individual learner.

The strategies mentioned in this book  include:

• Excellent organisational skills.
• Positive classroom climate.
• Personalised their teaching.
• Use of dialogic teaching and learning.

The effectiveness of your teaching is judged by:

• the value you add to your learners' store of information, concepts, skills and values:
• the degree of independence your learners are able to exercise in managing their own learning now and in the future;
• the extent to which you develop a sense of well-being in learners.

Come along and learn about How Visuals can help our students

Come along and learn about  How Visuals can help our students Manage their own behaviour and access the curriculum.

Link to this doc https://goo.gl/TvV7rr
Book you attendance here.

Thursday 10 th May

Facilitator: Donna Ryan

Venue: Sommerville 80a Tripoli Rd

Using visuals to support learners with additional needs.

How to help our students access the curriculum using a variety
of visual strategies and supports.

Suitable for teachers working with all age groups.