Focusing on ways to engage student participation during reading activities.

Students only learn when they are engaged. In order to to engage our students, we need to gain and hold their attention We do this by making ourselves irresistible (this includes being as silly as possible when reading a shared story) and presenting activities (like art), that are just too amazing to ignore. Once we have student's attention we can add in the learning.

For our students to learn new skills they need lots and lots of practice. We try to provide plenty of variety in what this looks like, so students don't become disengaged. In Te Tauihu we have tried to link all our shared reading with our visual art in such a way, that the story transitions into a concrete/practical example of what they have read or what has been read to them. Examples of this would be our "Oi Cat, Oi Dog, Oi Frog" stories where our students have created visual art examples of these characters. The "Stone Underpants" saw some pretty unusual materials being used to design underpants, as well as some racy underwear. These art opportunities help to concretise our stories for our students.

Students learn by doing, being engaged, making mistakes, thinking, problem solving and having the space and support to take risks. Therefore, during art learning activities, staff support students to focus on what they are doing and not what the end result looks like (although we have been pleasantly surprised by some results).

We have seen some great results in the short time since school has reopened. Some students have increased their ability to attend to tasks (especially if it involves a story which contains specific interests to them), some have started choosing their own books during shared reading time and others have begun to use colourful semantics effectively to answer who/what doing questions.

More advanced students have increased their vocabulary (or ask what does a certain word mean) and some are developing their reading comprehension abilities.

Long may this journey into the wonderful world of books and reading continue.