Literacy Ramble 4.5.16

On Wednesday as our syndicate meeting we went to a presentation by Jill Eggleton about language. She is an author of many books we use as school and is a Literacy genius. She spoke of the importance of poetry, repetition and rhyme, and reading to children just for fun and not asking them a whole heap of questions.
It was great to hear her experiences with kids and their literacy journeys. The main thing I took away was to keep the learning fun and relevant children. I am going to incorporate more poetry and more reading to children. It is easy to put these things off as there is so many things we need to do however its very important to help children develop language, a love of books and learning.
Jill Eggleton pointed out some great kiwi authors, Margaret Mahy and Joy Cowley, have some wonderful language in their stories. Many great writers make up interesting language and use description to really pull the reader into their stories.
After the Jill Eggleton talk we went through to the Literacy Ramble to see some mini presentations from teachers around the Christchurch area and some things they are doing in their programmes which they find successful. We saw some great ideas to encourage children to monitor their own learning and goals before seeing the teacher. There were some great ideas to engage children and ways to share their learning.
The whole evening was great and it helped me remember some key things I need to do. I got some great ideas to use and some learnt some amazing things.

ASD Course, Term 1, 2016

I attended an ASD course with Tony Attwood. What a wonderful PD session to be able to attend. I learnt a lot about children with ASD and how different they can all be.
Main things I took away.

• Give response time- children with ASD may require a longer response time. Do no rephrase the question as this is starting the process again. Examples were given about children who took a couple of minutes to respond to a question and children taking a few hours to respond to things which may have happened to them, e.g. if they were hurt by another child they may respond a couple of hour later by yelling out "stop it" or lashing out. The late response may seem out of place however they need longer to process what has happened to them.
• All children with ASD are different and there are varying degrees of ASD.
• There are things which children with ASD find hard and taxing on them and things that "recharge" or things they enjoy.  It is important to break up the harder tasks with tasks that "recharge" them to get them through the day without too much stress. E.g. playing out in the playground may be stressful to a child and reading books  may be something positive that helps them de-stress, break up the stressful times. It can be like a bank, deposits are for the positive things- we put into our own bank, withdrawals are the activities which stress and take away from the bank.
• Children with ASD generally favor activities when they are alone and situations with a lot of people can be quiet stressful.
• Give children with ASD a positive experience after a big event or meltdown, give them a chance to calm down and get over it. Understand that they process bad situations differently.