It was a great relief when I heard we will partially return to school this coming week. We will change to a two-on, two-off schedule for the next two weeks of school. Remember there is a national holiday in-between the two. The exact schedule was in Mr. Prest’s announcement.
I sent home an email to all students outlining all the materials they need to bring back to school. I would really appreciate it if you would take the time on Sunday night to work with your student to make sure everything comes back. Again, learning will be impacted if they forget something at home. The list is in the Back To School slideshow PDF.
I want to thank those parents who could attend Parent Back to School time on Tuesday and Thursday. I hope you got a good view of the up-coming year. The PDF of the slide show with all the links is attached to this letter.
One issue that ALL of you need to consider is parental controls on your students computers. With us being so heavily reliant on technology for learning, you can be guaranteed that all students have found the distractions like YouTube and Hangouts. While I cannot prove this, I believe that 17 of my 20 students are actively on hangouts and YourTube during school lessons. It is easy to say “not my student”, but I think you would be surprised to know that it is everyone in my class except those that already have parental controls on their computer. There are a large number of reasons why I support controls all the way up to grade 10 - longer if there is a serious addiction. When a child is alone in their bedroom with their computer (something I am also totally against) they are all over the place online and this is definitely a distraction and has the potential of being a disaster (something I have been involved with in my years teaching). It is not a problem when we are full time in school since we only use computers for support and action. At home, it is THE tool for learning. If you want more information about this, the ICT department here at SFS can help out. It really worked for a student of mine last year. Please research this and consider it.
Next week we will publish our first pieces of writing. I cannot comment further on this as I have only seen about 25% of my students writing so I have no idea what to expect. The drop folders I set up seem to be a problem for some students - something I am not sure why since the other 75% are working great. I will be looking into this with the students when they come back to school next week.
There are some changes to our schedule for next week to accommodate the needs of some specialist teachers. While the total amount of time is not changing, the classes are being rearranged to make the most of in-class time versus virtual time. It is also my intent to start making the home time more of a project based time and the in-school time the instructional time. I am not sure how much longer we will remain in a hybrid learning mode, but I want to continue moving ahead. Most of these changes will happen after the national holiday.
I want to thank all of you for your support, It has been very stressful for me these past 5 weeks so I can only imagine what it is like for your student. I marvel at their flexibility and willingness - your scholars are truly an amazing bunch. It must also be a stressful time for you and that is why I am truly grateful for your unending help and positiveness. I know that the students are thankful as well.
Please stay healthy and safe,
Harold Daw
