Narrowing the focus

At the beginning of term one our class focus was to choose one major item that we (my students & I ) would focus on, perfect, learn, digest, repeat day in and day out until my students could feel confident enough to move on.  Our major focus was to learn grammar structures the way my students could understand it.  Reflecting back on this now i can see it was a very positive move for all the right reasons especially that my students were able to take hold of this one strategy apply it and build on it giving them the freedom to start expressing themselves through writing about their personal experiences in Te Reo Māori with some accuracy and comprehension of basic structures in which they are now self correcting for themselves giving them more ownership over their work only looking to the kaiako for reassurance.  Setting small targets and milestones were key ingredients.

Examples:
A small target could be to write two accurate sentences using the AVPAN structure about a topic.  A typical topic could be to write about an event you participated in recently.

Students learnt a set of common articles in Te Reo Māori, leaning the meaning of these implementing and using the same ones until they felt confident and went onto add new ones.

This may seem like a slow process however the slower the better as the students needed that time to practice and once they understood it they were now independently writing without my help.

Consistency and repetition has paid off for these students as they are now onto their second topic producing drafts, crafting and perfecting their written pieces. Mauri Ora tauira mā.