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?

Writing opportunities - Mark making

Supporting writing development.

Our young learners need lots of experience in writing and developing fine motor skills.
It is important that these activities have purpose and are fun.

Pre Writing skills

When developing early skills for writing students need to be able  form the following lines in order to be able form letter correctly.  Our student develop the skills to form these lines and shapes at different ages (chart above is an indicator) as they develop fine motor control, in hand strength and motor planning skills.

Motor planning can affect a child's handwriting in many different ways: 

• figuring out how to hold the pencil and how to put it to paper
• planning the layout of work on the page and carrying it out
• establishing the motor memory of remembering how letters are formed
• carrying over the memory from one task to the next

It is important our students get the opportunity to develop in-hand manipulations skills and hand strength so they can write and carry out regular classroom activities eg cutting, gluing etc.

Sometime student have difficulty carry out writing and fine motor tasks because the have poor core strength. 

Early writing levels

While researching my  USLT Inquiry I have observed students whose  writing levels are too low to be assessed by NZ standardised testing.

At Sommerville we are currently using a Developmental Writing Scale which is helping us identify what level our students are at and what their next learning targets are.

I thought I would share this with our Mainstream colleagues.

Developmental Writing Scale

Check out this great one page  visual snapshot of children's writing development.

Reminder to Manaiakalani COL schools that you can book time with me to discuss your literacy programmes for students with additional needs.

Additional support at Writing time.

Do your students need additional support at writing time?

Sometimes using writing plans and frames at the planning and draft stage help our learners remember their ideas add more information to their stories.

 Sentence starters and models scaffold the students writing until they understand the structure needed and have developed a memory for their ideas.

Writing involves alot of thinking and processing  as well as good language skills.

"Planning takes the writing assignment and long-term memory as input, which then produces a conceptual plan for the document as output. Planning includes sub-activities of generating (coming up with ideas), organizing (arranging those ideas logically in one’s head), and goal setting (determining what effects one wants to achieve and modifying one’s generating and organizing activities to achieve local or global goals). "  Hayes and Flower (1980)

Let's make it easier for our students to experience success!