Week 4, term three, has finished already!
My learning journal so far…

• Running Records (of oral language).  Thanks to our schools' resident expert in reading, I learned I have been making a key error when analyzing the reading in terms of M/S/V - my mistake using M to mean 'does the word the child said mean the same as the word in the text?'  but have leaned the question I need to consider is 'up until that point in the reading (when the error occurs) does the reading make sense?'  We may be having more whole school PD is this area to ensure all teachers are recording our students' reading correctly/consistently.  I like what Owhata literacy has done on their wiki space where all the info a teacher needs can be found, and the running record protocol for this school is made very clear in an attached document.
• in-school PD to learn about using the ELLP  (English Language Learning Progressions) matrices to determine which stage an ELL (English Language Learner) is at.
• familiarizing myself with the ESoL support documents will be ongoing.  Am finding the SELLIPS books very helpful so far, also the ELIP resource.  
• remembering what a great resource we have in the National Library.  On their website are links to some great digital resources.
• I have been working with ST, a 10 year old student from Tonga who has recently enrolled in our school and who does not speak much english yet.  So far much of the work has been one-one.  This week I found some readers in Tongan at the public library so asked ST to read one to me.  The book was a ministry of education publication 'Ka kau he vai kaukau' '.  We talked about the pictures (and I tried to make meaning of the text).  It was interesting for me to hear ST read as it did not sound like he could read fluently.  Reading was stilted, and I was able to help him sound some words out.   This is not reliable data as I have no idea of text difficulty besides the fact it was short text.  Also whether or not it was a confidence issue for ST.  Unfortunately many of the Tongan texts printed by the Ministry of Education are no longer available for purchase, nor can I find any in our resource room (yet).  Something we learned was the importance of continuing  the ELL students' literacy in their first language as well as in english.

And one way we have used the iPads so far is with the Book Creator app.  

ST and I went for a walk around the school taking photos.  We then wrote a simple text to go with the pictures (i.e. Here is a …. - this followed the pattern of an emergent PM text we were reading "Here is a House" ).  We recorded ourselves reading the text on each page also.  This book is now in iBooks on his class' iPad. (Each class has 6 iPad, one in each class is a white 'teacher's' iPad - so I am trying to use that one with him so it's easy to see which one his work is saved on.

One of the literacy groups also made a copy of their reading text "Grandma's Stick" - we took photos of the pictures in the book and recorded the text for each page.  

And a goal…to have some pictures for next post!  A change in colour of the text will have to do for now :)