Begin to collect evidence and data and come to the next session ready to share your preliminary findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge i.e. using your baseline student data and evidence.
For this inquiry I will be working with a core group of 8 students from a group of 21 year 7/8 students. My inquiry group consists of 3 x y7 girls, 2 x y7 boys and 3 x y8 boys. Looking at the Writing and Spelling data, these students were identified as those that had gaps that needed filling to accelerate them to the level of their year group.
What I noticed when analysing my groups e-asTTle was that the majority of the year 7 vocabulary scored higher than their spelling, however the level of their vocabulary was lower than expected. Out of my 3 year 8 students, 2 of the students vocabulary was at a higher level than their counterparts, which is showing me they have used higher level language. This could possibly be because of the T-Shaped literacy programme we used last year as well as RFE Robyn introduced in LS2. The other year 8 student was not in our class last year which is evident by his lower vocabulary mark. The difference in the year 8 and year 7 vocabulary has come with understanding how a basic word can be replaced with a more enticing word in their writing. This was evident with year 8 using words in their e-asTTle writing sample about a community facility like 'affordable' rather than 'cheap'.
My next steps are to familiarize the students with new words and expand their vocabulary knowledge along with learning the spelling conventions, essentially word consciousness. To aide with this I have looked at my hunches, talked to colleagues and have introduced both a digital resource along with each student having their own book to make their own word bank.
