Agility With Sound 3 weeks in.

Where We Are At.

I have now been taking 3 groups of 4 children for a 1/2 hour Agility With Sound session  Monday - Wednesday for 3 weeks. 2 of the children started only a week ago and two children have left Pt England after they had started with me. I will now be picking up one other.

In only 3 weeks I have already seen a significant improvement in the children's ability to read at speed their fluency sheets of 3 letter words.

Here is a typical sample from the initial testing which highlights some of the difficulty the children have with hearing and recording sounds.

                                                      vat  beg  hid  mop   bud
                                                      mash   thud   chap   moth
                                                            sped  snip  flop

Pretest	WEEK 7 FLUENCY TEST
no √ in 1 min
31	51
31	65
16	48
6	52
13	29
14	49
6	29
14	18
10	46
5	45
2	59

 Also I can see significant improvement in the children being able to break words into parts, hear the sounds within the parts and find the corresponding letter tiles to build the word. Following this we randomly check the sounds of the letters turning the tiles over until they can say the sounds of each letter or ending in any order with the letters all hidden. From this they are mostly reasonably confident at writing the word on the whiteboard by themselves. These words are generally multisyllabic words, such as flustering, continent, and blistered. For a child who has really struggled to write the simplest words they encountered in their initial test such as beg, vet, mop, being able to write and remember these much more difficult words is extremely motivating and empowering.

At the moment the focus is solely on gainly fluency at these chunks and getting a better understanding at how words can be broken apart and put together. There are texts which support this learning which are introduced only once the children have made a significant jump in their fluency of the word chunks. These books are carefully written to contain predominantly words that follow the common sounds the letters  make (particularly the vowels). They are also free of illustrations for the reason that these children compensate for their lack of word/letter sound processing by over-using all the visual clues they can including illustrations, as well as the shape of a word. The aim is to rewire the patterns and pathways in their brain to be able to use the grapho-phonic side of their brain rather than predominantly the visual.

Where To From Here?
Having trialled this programme I can see how easily it could be supported in the classroom or with support workers. It is fairly straightforward and structured so is easy to learn without lots of PD. I was having a conversation with Betsy the other day and she mentioned a couple of schools that are trying to implement it with more students. One school is a small country school of 45 student and they are doing it schoolwide. Another is an intermediate where they have implemented it in a specifically chosen classroom where all the children in the class are taught using this method. Betsy was highlighting how getting the classroom teachers on board for reinforcing the programme in their group teaching of these children is significant in seeing these children progress faster.  This is an area I would like to next explore, particularly as it is uncertain as to whether we have the funding to continue me having time out of the classroom to implement it.

The other focus I have is looking at how we can avoid having so many children in need of such a programme in the first place.
It has become evident to me that right from the early literacy learning we engage our 5 year olds in, we are unwittingly supporting and strengthening them to be using the visual sides of their brains. Most of the high frequency words we get the children to learn require that they learn it as a whole, as they are words that don't follow the typical sounds associated with each letter: said, come, look, a, here, are, the, my, for, go, to. The PM readers very early on require children to learn these words and in fact have very few words that children are able to decode using their letter/sound knowledge.
Many children are able to integrate the different strategies in learning to read, such as  using meaning, syntax as well as grapho-phonic cues. However too many of our children struggle, and have an imbalance in the strategies they use, with minimal focus on the letter/sound element. This is compounded by the fact that the vowels sounds in particular, in the Polynesian languages including Maori are so different to English.

With my new entrant children I have tried this term to be more deliberate at doing making and breaking with the magnetic letters daily. This involves using a high frequency word (generally the ones that do have the common sounds) and making new words by changing or adding  a letter
e.g. at - mat, cat, sat, fat, hat, bat, rat.
I have been surprised at how quickly they can catch on to this.
Now that the children mostly have some letter sounds they know I am going to adapt Betsy's fluency sheets of 3 letter words so that we can be practising them already. Hopefully this will help in avoiding having so many children who have big gaps in that knowledge. Another element Betsy is rigid about is not using the letter names but rather always referring to the letter by the predominant sound. I have also incorporated this into what we do.
All these components of Agility With Sound  I feel complement the Gwyneth Phillips reading programme that we know has worked successfully. I am keen to see how we can make the most of this programme and see the difference we can make with its implementation.

Here is a sample of how it all rolls.

2019 Inquiry

This year Toni our AP went to a PD session with Betsy Sewell. From having two dyslexic children of her own Betsy developed a programme 'Agility With Sound' for helping other children who have had difficulty with learning to read and write.

She explains how reading and writing is a relatively recent development for human brains which means that there is not a specific area designated in the brain for this. Most able English readers and writers use the part of their brain used for speech and sound, but often people who have difficulty learning to read and write use the visual part of their brain instead. The programme she has developed has a strong phonics base and helps to reestablish the pathways in the learner's brain back to using the speech/language area.




Children can surprisingly become relatively adept at using the visual side of their brain for literacy up to a certain level but will struggle as the texts become more difficult. In addition the demand on their brains is much greater trying to decipher text using the visual side, so this in turn compromises their ability to focus also on the comprehension of the text.

We had Betsy come to Pt England to give a quick overview of her programme. What she said really resonated so we have decided to try it with some of our year 5/6 students.

INQUIRY FOCUS
 I have decided to focus  my inquiry on seeing what shift in reading and writing we can get from a group of children who are reading and writing well below their chronological age using the Agility With Sound literacy programme.

PRETEST
The initial part of programme involves testing each child individually using a couple of specifically designed tests.  The first one is a spelling test where the child is at a whiteboard. You, as the recorder note down each attempt at spelling the word including changes they make. (This is key in helping to get an understanding of how the child is processing the information - what part of their brain they are using) It clearly highlights gaps or misconceptions in the child's phonological understanding, and also what they do know.
I found this test really eyeopening. To see these children really struggle with trying to spell even basic 3 letter words. To see them knowing that what they had written didn't 'look' quite right so added in a random letter to change that 'look' rather than listening for specific sounds.
Here are two examples.




The second part of the testing is a timed minute test seeing how many words they can read. These words are not high frequency words, rather words that are made up of the basic standard letter sounds. Starting with consonant-vowel-consonant, then adding in blends and multisyllabic.
The test shows how quick they are at processing letter/sounds and also highlights the misconceptions they have.

The final test is another spelling test where the words are made up words.

This programme has similarities to a few things I was trying to do in 2016 when I was taking some children for withdrawal literacy lessons. I had the realisation that the children in these groups had really poor grapho/phonic knowledge and their speed at processing and decoding was really slow and inaccurate. I had searched for activities people used for dyslexic children and came across a similar process which I used daily and felt made a difference.

I am really excited to be trialling Betsy's programme as it seems very specific and targeted. Although I don't think it is a programme you would teach everyone how to read and write I think there are components that complement our Gwyneth Phillips literacy really well which could possibly help avoid having so many children not connecting with the crucial side of their brain for so many years, ending up like the group I will have - children who have learnt inefficient and inaccurate strategies to help them read and write.

Student Collaboration

From the same Teaching Channel site here's another clip that has some good reminders about ways to establish effective student collaboration.

https://www.teachingchannel.org/video/encourage-student-collaboration

Developing Mathematical Discussion

"The Same or Different: Developing Mathematical Argumentation in Kindergarten."

I came across this clip and thought it highlighted a really good way to start getting children into not only starting to notice similarities and differences but then also being able to express what they notice, explain their thinking and agree or disagree with others.
Lots of thinking going on with one simple activity.

Teaching Self-Compassion

I came across this really interesting article

How Self-Compassion Supports Academic Motivation and Emotional Wellness

which ties in fantastically with what I have read about teaching growth mindset to children. The main idea is that teaching self compassion can help children develop resilience and strength.

"When a student develops self-compassion, the seat of motivation shifts.  Since internal value doesn’t depend on external achievement, it frees students up to experiment, take risks and try new paths.  “Self-compassion leads to learning goals instead of performance goals — such as trying again after messing up,” "

The article also says how teaching self-compassion is particularly valuable for children who have experienced trauma as it can even help children rewire the neural pathways associated with attachment. 

So another valuable element to somehow try and incorporate into our programme.

Play-Based Learning

While developing oral language continues to be a focus, this term we have decided to put a greater emphasis on exploring play-based learning.  From observing incidental interactions the children have had with each other while they are engaged in the independent play component of our programme, it has been obvious that there are many positive benefits with play.
Firstly the children are interacting with each other. They are negotiating, sharing ideas, responding to each other, expanding on other's ideas, agreeing, disagreeing, reasoning. In other words, not only developing important social skills but also language skills.
Secondly they are `being creative, such as coming up with innovative and different ways to play with equipment and designing and constructing like with the blocks and sand.

A focus for us now is to try and build on these positive attributes of play and help foster conditions for children to be really developing their thinking skills along with social skills. We are trying to give the children a greater variety of experiences to explore, and looking at ways of focussing their play in particular directions by setting challenges.

We also need to be looking at ways to record their exploring and thinking, in order to revisit their experiences, to help develop their language and thinking more.

Cynthia Greenleaf

Last week I went to the  Collaborative Reasoning PLG with Cynthia Greenleaf.


There were several similarities between her programme and DMIC: The establishment of group norms was important to help create an environment where all children felt they had a voice seemed to be the main one. Having a task where children have to think was another crossover.

In the seminar we were asked to do an activity in groups where we had to look at a picture of an 18th century crime scene, read the accompanying article about it and draw conclusions about what had happened. The most interesting thing highlighted for me was how important it was to have a scenario that was didn't emphasise a single dominant interpretation to help promote discussion, and develop the skill of supporting your views with evidence.

This made me wonder about some of the reasons I have been finding it very difficult establishing group norms in DMIC. The establishment of group norms has felt very teacher-led and forced for me. It hasn't seemed a natural process at all. Now I am wondering if particularly at our level when the problems are fairly simple, that there just isn't the need for discussion. It is trying to force something to happened when the reality there isn't enough depth to allow it to happen.

So my main take-away from this PLG was to try and establish these group norms in a different context, rather than trying to establish them in DMIC. Create some group discussions where children will have ideas to add. Where there are different interpretations so they can learn how to listen to others ideas and share their own but be able to help develop the skill of backing up their views. Then having learnt these skills in more natural and less contrived situations they can transfer these skills into the DMIC lessons.

My next to-do is to come up with some activities to help develop this.

I found the same activity online here.

Slip or Trip