daw.com - Oct 10

Here is this week’s learning schedule;

Monday - in school (day 4)

Tuesday - virtual learning (day 5)

Wednesday - virtual Learning (day 6)

Thursday - in school (day 1)

Friday - in school (day 2)

I find that we are moving long very nicely even with the interruption of virtual learning.  The only area I am concerned about is writing.  It is impossible for me to see how to help students when I cannot see what they are writing.  This has made teaching writing very hard to do.  I catch up with most of my students when they are in class but some are just not meeting the expectations.  We finished our first unit on Narrative Writing last week and move on to Research Reports this coming week.  This is a unit that many of the students like as we look at how to research a topic in full.

Our next reading unit is in line with the research unit.  The title is Tackling Complexity but mostly it is about making the most out of non-fiction books.  When I watch students “read” non-fiction books mostly all I see is a scanning of the pages looking at the pictures first and maybe some reading.  This unit will look at how to use the various text structures and writing styles to get the most from the reading.

This coming week we will finish out math unit on Multiplication and Division of whole numbers.  I am finding that many of the students still are unsure of their abilities in division so I will be adding in review lessons to continue strengthening this area.  We are still completing our Resort Report project and hope to be finished it in the next 10-12 days.  The next project is fractions based and involves a bakery.  It ties in nicely with our next unit on Fractions and Mixed Numbers.  We will write the final assessment for this unit sometime this coming week.

Our migration simulation on Thursday was a huge success and it really gave the scholars something to think about as if they were refugees or misplaced people from another land.  We all had a great time and learned a lot about migration.

On Monday we will do our first service project with the PK4 classes as the building things with cardboard.  My class will spend 45 minutes with the class helping where needed.  As the oldest students in the school, they can provide excellent roles models for these children who look up to them.

Thursday is the first Band day where students bring their instruments to school (hooray).  I will put it in their planners on Wednesday to remind them.

Students need to bring all their books and assignments back to school on Monday.  It is very hard to get work completed if they keep leaving things at home.  Please help them - anything that looks like school work/book (except library books) should come back to school on Monday.

Thank-you for helping your student with their family tree assignments this past week.  This week we are going to make a family tree poster with the information they have collected.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

Harold Daw

daw.com - Oct 4

I do hope everyone had a happy Chuseok holiday and is rested and ready to go again.

First off let us all welcome Emma to our classroom.  She is new to Korea but not new to international schools.  I am sure the students will do their best to make her feel at home and welcome to 5D.

Our schedule this week is as follows;

Monday Oct 5 - in school (day 1 - Band & Library)

Tuesday Oct 6 - virtual at home (Day 2  - Art)

Wednesday Oct 7 - virtual at home (Day 3 - Band)

Thursday Oct 8 - in school (day 1 - Band and Library) *** This is the makeup day from Aug 18th.

Friday Oct 9 - PD day for teachers, no school

This week we will complete our first published writings.  I have now read over about 70% of the final drafts and what I see is quite varied.  Some students have learned what I have been teaching and either put it in to their writing or attempted to.  Others are still in the learning stage of this kind of in-depth writing,  This is not unusual as it is most likely the first time that they have had to write a narrative that not only tells the story but also give the reader a theme, in-depth look at the characters and highly descriptive scenes.  I have commented on all students who have shared their work with me.

I must ask all of you to please not be hovering during the home learning time,  You are not helping your student since they will not get this when in school and I am expecting to be full time in school within the next month. One of the goals of grade 5 is to make the students understand their own learning and when help is needed to ask for it - in teacher talk, having their own agency.  This should also be the entire time they are online learning.  While this can be a hard idea, we are built to learn from our mistakes and no mistakes does not make us better - just more reliant on others. Please find other things to do while your scholar is on line.  I am sure they will ask for help if they need it.

Students have band on Monday & Thursday but should NOT bring their instruments.  We still do not have clearance for students to play instruments or sing,.  We are expecting a change in this soon so please stay alert to this.  While students are at home, they can play their instrument but need to be 1-2 feet away from the computer which needs to be pointing to them.  This is quite a unique opportunity for students so I want to do the most we can when we are virtual.

This week is our first time we have library period so students should return all books in order to sign out more books for the rest of the next two weeks.  Our next unit is on non-fiction reading and writing and I will be requiring them to find books for this unit of study.  These books will go home as we continue with our 2-day on, 2-day off schedule.  As we have no idea how long this will continue, being on top of this is VERY important.

I have sent an email to each student of the things I am still missing from them.  Please help them locate these materials, finish the work or let me know when something is missing, The longer this takes the more impact it has on their learning. While there will be time to work on it on Monday, the only assignment that will be due on Monday is their THINGS I WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT ME poster and writing (the latter should have been completed about 5 weeks ago now).  If something is lost let me know so I can try to replace it.

Parent - teacher conferences are in about two weeks so be on the lookout for emails about how to sign up for these.  These emails will come from the ES office not from me.

Our new PYP unit is on Migration.  This week students will need some help from you regarding your family tree and movement over time.  Please assist when necessary.  It is a neat unit and really gets students looking into their own backgrounds as wells the plight of many people over the world who are either forced or choose to migrate.  This unit will go for about the next 6 weeks.

We continue our math unit on Multiplication and Division of whole numbers.  Not surprisingly, some students have really picked this up while others are struggling even after three weeks of learning.  As this is a unit that has a lot of impact for the rest of the year, we will work more and more on this over the next two weeks.  The test for this will be next week sometime.  We will do the pretest for the next unit, one of the two days we are in school this week.

For the first time since the start of the year, I have some pics to attach to this home letter.  Have a look at the engineering challenge we did.  There were some amazing outcomes with this.  Over all everyone had fun and it worked really well with our design unit.

 

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