daw.com - Sept 19

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

Link to PDF

daw.com - Sep 6

It has been another week of online and the students seem to be adjusting to it just fine.  Me on the other hand, not so well.  I really miss having my students in the class.  I keep hoping and praying that this ends really soon.

We are well along in our reading, writing and UOI units of study.  I can only go by the students who have shared their work with me but so far they are looking OK.  One of the biggest challenges online is the teacher getting to see the work of the students.  There is no perfect system for this.

I had three discussions about reading with parents this week so I want to share my thoughts.  Many of the students are stuck on current series reading novels.  While this does mean they are reading, I always ask the question are they learning?  Most series are just reruns of the first novel.  Formulaic writing that sells really well so the authors use to sell their books.  What concerns me is that the reading is a waste of learning time (not reading reading time which is good).  I want students at this age to start to expand their thinking as they read and not just read over and over for the sake of reading.  Many of our lessons so far, and many to come, revolve around the idea of thinking as you read and expanding on thoughts. Generally this is very hard with series books since most is already known from the first book.  While I know we do not have access to the school library at the moment, students can use Overdrive and Epic to select and read books.   Secondly, if the book is not a ‘bit’ of a challenge then once again there is probably not very much learning happening.  This is a hard one as almost none of us know if a book fits into this category.  If a child reads a book and understands all of it, it was not challenging enough.  That is what I tell my students.  It does not mean it was a bad book, just a book that was too easy for them.

This week in our UOI time, students will be deciding on a small project, planning the project, making the project (if possible) and then reflecting on the project.  They have about 10 to choose from.  This will mean not as much online time with me other than to ask questions and in need of clarification.  I have planned it this way as one of the things I want time to do is conference with my students.  I will be using this time to do this while the others are off on their project.

We have completed out first math unit and there will be an online assessment coming up this week.  Our next unit its multiplication and division of whole numbers to 1,000,000.  While most students will eventually use a calculator for this, this unit gives them the understanding of how it works.  One of the more interesting lessons in this unit us using a spreadsheet.

As part of the materials I sent home, there were some math extension booklets.  This is not how I would normally do this but given our situation, this is the next best thing.  They are to work on these when they have completed the regular daily math work.  We have also now used IXL which is kind of a drill program and Greg Tang Math which is more of a math game approach.  These are now part of our regular math repertoire and will be used very regularly.

We also started our Typing Club this week.  There are a lot of students who have used this in grade 4 and some from other schools as well.  There is only one rule about using this system, students must be using two hands to type.  While I cannot watch them while at home, I have told them that upon return to school, I will get after them if they are not using two hands.  Since middle and high school involve a huge number of assignments handed in typed, this is a good start to help them out.

IXL, Greg Tang Math and Typing club are always available at home if students are bored.

I hope everyone is happy and healthy in these unusual times we live in.  I told students that they are now part of history as I am sure it will be written about at some time in the future.

Regards,

Harold Daw