Update No. 1.

It’s been four weeks since first sharing my inquiry focus.  SEA data has been gathered for my five new students, and here it is (including results from students who began school last year).

SEA DATA 2018-2019 (word writing only)
Student	Gender	Writing (raw score)	Approx. date of 6 year net.
A	F	0	April
B	M	1	June
C	M	0	June
D	F	3	June
E	M	0	May
F	F	1	July
G	F	3	August
H	M	0	October
I	M	0	November
J	M	5	November
K	F	5	December
L	F	1	December
M	M	3	November
N	M	6	December

Highlighted students will be sitting their six-year-net over the coming three months, so I shall be working on them to get the best possible results for them.  My gut feeling is that of those six students,  only one (D) may reach the targeted 37 words in 10 minutes.  The others are still struggling to identify letter sounds, and so do not do a lot of independent writing.  I'm hopeful that they will, though, have better scores than last year's cohort. 

What have I done so far?  We have been learning two new HFW (high frequency words)

a week, and give opportunities for students to write these on whiteboards.  (10 new words).  Hopefully, as we spend time focussing on letter sounds, the ability to sound out words will become more apparent.  But...greater than that is developing student confidence in their own ability.  Practising writing is helping with that.

Where to:

Next term I will be back in control of the class (I have a student teacher at present), and the plan is to focus on word families - hat, sat, mat; still, fill, hill etc.  Also I'd really like to find a way of using song to help with writing words.  I'll see what I can come up with during the coming school holidays.

I really look forward to seeing all my students (including the ones who are struggling at present), become successful in writing HFW and word families.