Posted on: 14/11/2019
Class teachers need to make the most out of their teaching assistants and undoubtedly a well-placed, well-prepared assistant can change the course of a lesson and ultimately the course of children’s lives. As TAs are usually on lunch/playground duty, they can also build relationships with children that are qualitatively different to the class teacher but equally as important. More often than not, TAs are asked to work with groups of children who are the most vulnerable.
However, teaching assistants can come up against many obstacles to making significant impact on children’s learning. First and foremost, they seldom have sufficient time to prepare, to study planning and this can mean having to think on the spot as the lesson progresses. Whilst it is important for the class teacher to meet with the TA before lessons commence to go over objectives, pedagogies and groups they will be working with, this meeting can often be squeezed by the many other morning demands.
At the Literacy Tree, we are often asked to run training sessions for TAs and we wanted to collate some important ingredients and approaches to this valuable role.
First of all, we want our TAs to have resources at their disposal which can be used time and time again, which take minimum preparation, can be easily differentiated and make learning investigative, interactive and fun for those in their group. Our suggestions would be the following: stacks of post-it notes (preferably of four different colours), paperclips, a plastic pouch, sentence strips, mini-whiteboards, blue tac and some masking tape. These simple resources can be pulled out in any English lesson to support with vocabulary, sentence work and modelled, shared writes.
Vocabulary, Vocabulary, Vocabulary
Vocabulary acquisition is of vital importance for children to access literature and produce their own individual work. Research has shown that in order to fully comprehend a piece of text, we need to be able to decode around 95% of the words it contains. It is therefore essential that there be an opportunity, once the group settles, to explore and discuss the words that will be used in the lesson.
Post-its can be used to quickly write out key vocabulary – within the context of a quality book - using different colours for different word classes (once decided, make sure the colours are kept consistent). Keep the vocab in lower case letters so it’s sentence ready.
Once the vocabulary has been mapped out, games can be played to investigate meaning. Games such asmatching nouns to real objects/pictures; matching antonyms; pairing past and present tense, ordering synonyms; miming out adjectives and nouns; guess what the TA is drawing and match to the word; matching adjectives to nouns to create noun phrases to name a few. Children could even sort words into a Venn, with categories such as: Words I Know/New Words/Words I Can Guess. The main point here is that children get a chance to experiment and define words in context that they will be using imminently in their writing. If this writing is a description, choose to look at adjectives. If this is a story or diary entry, perhaps investigate verbs.
We would strongly advise storing the words from the session in a pouch and paperclipped together so that they can be pulled out at a later date. Children can discuss which words they remember from earlier in the week. If the verbs are all in one colour and the nouns in a different colour, your TA can quickly pull out the appropriate word class quickly to review.
The Nuts ‘n’ Bolts of Sentence Construction
Sentence strips are a great resource to look at sentence construction. Children need to see the vocabulary they’re going to use in a sentence. Once a sentence pattern has been decided on (e.g. ‘He saw a large tree’.), depending on confidence levels, keep the sentence structure the same and vary the vocabulary content (e.g. She heard a beautiful bird.’) using the post-its from the vocabulary activity. After a few variations of content, try cutting up the sentence and jumbling up the words, can the group unjumble the words? Which word(s) should have capital letters and where should the punctuation go? Use the masking tape to join the sentence together, sometimes the masking tape can represent the comma.
Single clause sentences could be extended with conjunctions (use Post-its again for this) e.g. ‘She saw a large tree and heard a beautiful bird’. Sentence strips can be used to experiment with clause order, subordination and coordination e.g. She felt happy because she saw a large tree’. Masking tape allows children to stick it all back together and see sentence construction in a hands-on, malleable way. If possible,blue tack the sentences to a space on the wall during the session.
Modelled/Shared Write
Another valuable piece of the puzzle is for children to see the TA use these sentences in a piece of writing. Whilst it is best to do this on some flipchart paper (that way the piece of writing can be displayed more easily), mini-white boards can also be used. There will be times when the TA will write out a piece, modelling writing behaviours (deliberate mistakes, editing as you go, thinking aloud) and there will be times when the children will contribute and they will construct a piece together – this is the difference between a modelled and shared writes.
What we want to avoid is the least confident writers in our class copying out verbatim an adult’s writing. Activities like this stifle creativity and choice. We want to avoid these children completing endless cloze passages. We want the work they do to be their own even if this is choosing vocabulary and sounding out single clause sentences. The more words and sentence patterns they have, the more fluent their writing will become.
Posted in: Curriculum
