I will share a grid for student learning this week( will be there Tuesday), it will be in the Other Learning Areas folder in student Google Drives.
We will have our first meet up on Wednesday morning at 9:30am to run through the learning for the week.
Students should not be spending too long on their devices each day. I estimate about 2 hrs a day. There are offline tasks and I know you will also have family time as well. Please let me know if you have any questions or need help with anything.
My advice is to keep a bit of a routine going as it will make starting back at school smoother if your child continues learning from home. I have put a link to a daily planner on our learning site, should your child want to plan their day.
I hope you and your family are doing ok. This is just a reminder of a few things to help your child be set up for learning to start Wednesday 15 April.
Your child's Holiday Reading Log is in their Google Drive Reading folder - they should be typing on the doc as they read. This will be handed in via Google Classroom after the holidays (see the tutorial below). Please encourage your child to read and complete their log, it encourages good habits.
Our school day will not be structured as it is when we are at school, there will be tasks that your child needs to complete, some to hand in, some to just do and some to share with others.
Please help your child manage their time on their devices, in the three days before the holidays some students were on a lot, and most of their time was simply in the class chat room. It was new so maybe they were just excited and I fully understand that they may be missing their friends.
When we have class or group chats I expect students to behave and follow our school Golden rules. If a student is not being respectful then I will contact you for support in helping them. Our class was really good during the few video sessions we did have. I do however think that smaller group sessions will be better.
School accounts are for learning only. If you allow your child to be online playing games, watching videos or doing other things then they need to use a different Google account on their Chromebooks.
Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns, I am happy to arrange online meetings should your child need some extra support. I did this with a few students before the holidays and it worked really well.
I will be in touch before school starts next Wednesday, just to let parents know a brief outline of the learning students can take part in during the week.
P.S. Ask your child to show you the class cooking/baking photos in our shared Google photos album, there are some great chefs amongst us.
We had our last class chat session today. This @chat tool will be switched off at 4pm today. We'll use it again after the holidays. I am super proud of our class in the way they have been respectful in our new online areas. Reminder: Students need to turn in their W8 tasks via our Google classroom, even if they are not quite finished. It'll be ok. It's in their 9 dots as shown below.
Reading logs are in student Google Drive Reading folders. Students can record their reading on these docs during the holidays. Set up a routine so you have a specific time each day just for reading - parents you might want to role model this e.g. no devices while students are reading (unless your run out of books and need to read online).
This video might be useful over the holidays.
Look after yourselves and your whanau over the break, email me if you need my help with anything. I'll send out a blog post nearer the end of the holidays.
