Testing results showed that most of my students work was too hard - it was two or three levels higher than they were working and I suspect that this may have contributed to SOME of the behaviour that we have been battling with. I spent Friday regrouping all of my kids and trying to rewrite all of my unit plans across the curriculum to suit the needs of these new groups.
In addition to this, I have been trying to find really engaging and fun activities for us to complete in the afternoons when the students are getting tired and grumpy. As a result, I have decided that we are going to trial starting up our "Learning without Subjects" lessons like I did last year but just use subjects - sort of an inquiry learning model that can encompass reading, writing, maths and all of the curriculum.
After asking a "focus group" (four kids from Room H) I have a good list of topics that they are eager to learn about. The most common was water, rivers, lakes, seas etc. So we are starting with UNDER THE SEA.
So far, students have been eagerly involved in the pre-work phase (Knowledge and Questioning) and have come up with 75 questions that they would like answered by the end of this topic. The real challenge is that now I need to find ways for students to obtain this knowledge and answer these questions, while still trying to cater for the VERY wide spread learning needs and abilities in Room H.
Challenge accepted! :)
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