Wrangling the Future: Recent Episodes
Pax O'Dowd, Lucy French, Alisha Smith
Kia ora and welcome to the Kātote Innovation Podcast, ‘Wrangling the Future’ hosted by our Innovation team within Kātote Kāhui Ako in North Canterbury. We aim to inspire, engage, challenge and celebrate all that is happening within Kātote and the wider education community. You can listen to us on the Innovation Portal Te Kāhui Ako Kātote, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
In a surprise change of events, we have a special episode of 'Wrangling The Future' with a national icon - Harold The Giraffe! In this episode we interview Siobhan Cummings, a former Life Education Educator, and Harold about the Life Education Trust, programmes for primary and secondary kura, life as an LE Educator and how technology has had an impact on what the Life Education Trust can provide. We also ask Harold some listener questions and 'get the goss' about Harold's relationship status. Happy listening.
Welcome back to the podcast ‘Wrangling The Future’. COVID had a massive impact on the lives of all members of our Kātote Kāhui Ako so we took a break from the podcast to regroup. We are continuing the podcast this year with some new voices and we are excited to bring some fresh content in 2022. In our first episode of this year, we interview Mel Taite, our Kātote Kāhui Ako lead Principal. Mel shares an update on the Kāhui restructuring and what progress has been made for the year so far. We also spend some time getting to know Mel with a series of quick fire questions. Happy listening.
In this episode we interview two Kaiapoi High School students, Ty and Jade. They share with us their experience of learning from home during the recent 2021 lockdown. They shed some light on the pros and cons of this experience, what they learnt from this and most importantly how this has helped them work towards their goals as well as prepare them for a future of learning and study.
Marina, Felicity Structured literacy 21/10/21
- Can you give us a brief explanation of the Science of reading?
The science of readingis a vast, body of scientifically-based research from a range of multiple disciplines. This insight has helped explain how early reading develops, why students struggle and what are the most effective assessment and instructional practises that benefit all students.*
The main influential findings tell us that:
- Reading is not natural like learning to talk. Early reading development requires, for most, systematic instruction in understanding the relationship between sounds and letters and how they are used to record the spoken word in print. Children who don’t have this understanding called the alphabetic principal by the end of their first year in school, tend to never catch up - despite good intervention. Hence the need to have a preventive model in schools by ensuring all children understand how speech sounds are mapped with letters and groups of letters from Day 1.
- Everyone learns to read the same way. Research has shown all skilled readers have both good word level decoding skills and appropriate language comprehension skills.
- There is a known pathway for reading. Reading starts with oral language. The reading pathway starts with connecting speech sounds to print and to the meaning of words. Struggling readers and non-readers haven’t yet established these connections. Explicit instruction that centres on language and reinforces the speech to print connection helps students build these circuits in the reading brain. The difference is that some children require more time, more repetition and the most explicit instruction.
- All children benefit from explicit and systematic instruction in the skills that form the reading pathway. That is phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, listening and reading comprehension. It is not too early to start teaching these foundational skills in Kindergarten. The same instruction we use for preventing reading failure is also ideal for our dyslexic students.
- Prevention is easier and cheaper than intervention. There are known indicators of reading that can be assessed early and change the course of a children's life if we get in early. So the message is, early, early, early. Don’t wait for them to fail.
Last minute notes:
Strong Leadership in schools makes the change to a SL an enormous difference. Teachers need not just the tools (decodable text) but the time to have those conversations with a literacy expert in their school. They need someone who is available within school to support them with observations, planning, continued assessments and refining practise. We are teaching in a very exciting time with literacy education finally changing through Aoteroa.
Top 10 Websites / Webinars / Facebook Pages to Follow
The Reading League
Reading Science in Schools
Science of Reading - What I should had learnt in College
Webinars:
Zaner-Bloser
https://www.zaner-bloser.com/science-of-reading-resource-hub.php
Blogs/Websites
The Reading Ape
https://www.thereadingape.com/
Reading Rockets
https://www.readingrockets.org/article/alphabetic-principle
Felicity added….
UFLI - University of Florida Literacy Institute
- Virtual Teaching Hub
- Tutorial
The tutorials has short 5min webinars on how to teach different skills like segmenting/blending etc
The Literacy Collective - Podcasts
The Literacy Collective (great podcasts) - a good place to build knowledge
- Link
Sound Pack sounds - NZ English - to make sure teachers are using pure sounds in NZ English
- LINK
In this inaugural episode of Wrangling the Future Podcast, we interview Bruce Kearney our Kātote Kāhui Ako lead Principal. Bruce shares with us the history, purpose and his own thoughts on what the Kāhui is all about. Tune in for our first introduction to the Kātote Podcast. Happy listening.