Throughout the term authentic writing opportunities have been afforded to the children in multiple ways. This has meant that in the last two weeks an explosion of authentic literacy has emerged from the students. When the students were prompted with the question “why do we write?” they responded

We write to tell stories – Elise

You can write about your day – Eddie

You can write a letter and put it in the post. – Sam

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Along with writing for story telling, the children have recently begun to document themselves and others during provocations showing the connection they are making between writing, building ideas and communicating ideas.

Through this provocation the students have created their own documentation wall to give back their documentation to the peers and to further support our inquiry. This opportunity has provided multiple opportunities for children to share their writing with their community, peer teach and to continue to develop their writing skills.

I like to document what other people have been doing by writing it down – Niamh

I write because it is interesting and fun! – Maggie

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Through this explosion of literacy the children have found value and connection to their personal writing goals. These goals were co created with their home group teachers and have allowed the students to focus on the craft of writing. This has been evident throughout the provocation time as students have been self editing their work using resources such as dictionaries, word walls, theories and each other.

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We will continue to provide these authentic opportunities for students to share their learning through writing and are excited to look for ways that this documentation can be purposefully shared with our wider learning community. 

We’re working as a team. – Elsie

Yeah! That’s what we do at this school! – Clem

As the children have been exploring the provocations set in each of our learning spaces, collaboration has continued to take over. In each space we teachers have observed discussion and teamwork as the children have been creating collaborative stories, artworks, research projects and modeled number investigations.

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Along with our observations, we have documented the learning so far with  teachers putting together our neighbourhood inquiry wall and our students building their own documentation wall. Both of these have continued to spark conversations as our neighbourhood continues to explore how to best  capture what we know and the most effective way to share what we know with others. The conversation of collaboration was gifted back to the children during our neighbourhood meetings.

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Jack – Teamwork Other people helping each other. We were documenting,  looking for collaboration!

Milo – I think that if people are collaborating they are having ideas and they are learning from each other’s idea and they are brainstorming without even noticing and then people document it. Flynn – Learning from each other can help you learn news and it can help you get a bit smarter and understand the world. You understand the world better by asking people much older than us because they have been around longer and they will  know more.

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As the conversation about collaboration continued, we were able to incorporate collaboration skills into our workshops, guided reading groups and maths investigation target groups. These provided opportunities for children to take on clear roles within a group decision, providing a lens for the group’s discussion. In literature circles children took on the roles of ‘interviewer’, ‘word wiz’, and ‘summarizer’. And in our maths roles of ‘presenter’, ‘solver,’ and ‘creator,’ as they described and presented their mathematical counting patterns.

We are now beginning to work in three project groups, all looking at how collaboration and connection strengthens our processes for learning. The children were given outlines and were encouraged to cast a vote for the group they were most interested in joining-

Our Place on Earth, Our Place on The Land, and Our Place in Our Community.

Groups will begin to look at the importance of communication and will be working to document their thinking and learning before reporting back to the neighbourhood. 

They [the project groups] are colliding together to form how we live and learn.  – Flynn & Maggie