For many weeks now, Paua and Kiwi have been working together to create a new learning environment.
There is a lot of ground work involved in setting up this kind of independent zone.
The students have been learning how to look at a piece of writing and break it down to analyse it. They have looked at sentence structure and punctuation. They are now able to talk more about their writing and where they think they "fit". More importantly they can clearly see their own next learning step and see what they can do to achieve this.
Some of the students have attended workshops on Punctuation this week in small groups of 10.
All students have been given a series of tasks to do for the week and tracking sheets to highlight when they have achieved them.
They are learning that they can make good choices with their time, which has been very powerful for them.
They have done all types of reading from, reading with an adult, reading with a buddy, reading magazines, journals, articles on the computer, reading each other's writing and learning how to give constructive feedback.
They have learnt that writing is a process and sharing your work with a buddy is helpful. Their buddy will read out their work to them so that the writer of the story can hear it how it has actually been written.
The Pawi students are now learning how to assess themselves in regards to self-managing their own behaviours. As per the writing, they can look at the statements from each stage and, using a great deal of honesty on their part, place themselves on a continuum of learning behaviour. Some thought very long and hard about where to place themselves and noticed that they had traits from two different areas, so placed themselves in between. But more importantly this now showed them how to get into the next stages by improving on one or two things. This was deep and honest thinking.
............and it was all worthwhile this afternoon when they received the class of the week award for their amazing hard work.
