Making Authentic Connections in Reading

Rationale:

As part of my teacher inquiry, I have been researching how I can increase student engagement and students' contribution to class discussion during a reading lesson. I looked into Sheena Cameron's Reading Strategies, to build reading comprehension strategies.  I used this information to create learning intentions and success criteria.  I have now developed this further by incorporating the learning intentions and success criteria into a SOLO Rubric.

For the audiobook Hatchet, I focused on visualization, activating prior knowledge, and sequencing the events of the story. Students get the opportunity to self-reflect using the SOLO Rubric for this audiobook which will contribute to their real-time reporting in HERO.

Planning:

I have created a multimodal approach to provide students with the opportunity to experience authentic learning activities.  I will also focus on making connections to their prior learning throughout the story and finishing with an EOTC experience to TOPEC learning bush survival skills. 

My approach to planning this unit of work took into consideration Ako: Learn, Hanga: Create, Tohatoha: Share pedagogy, building on my previous skills and knowledge. 

Here is an example from one Year 9 student, thus far.  

Brief: students respond by using images or videos on the following themes from the story Hatchet, to show their understanding of how to start a fire and items for surviving in the bush. 

How to Start a Fire:

Items for Survival:

Labeling Parts of a Plane:

I have provided the following links that have supported me in creating this unit of learning. 

Research:

Manaiakalani: Pedagogy Learn, Create, Share, Professional Learning 

Pam Hook's SOLO Taxonomy 

Concepts and Threshold Concepts 

Threshold Concepts in Practice 

Threshold Concepts: A short intro