A New Normal

 Teaching the past two years have been anything but normal, and this year is proving to be much of the same. I was challenged recently when I saw a social media post that showed a table of comparing a student's current school year with the last "normal" school year they attended. This made me stop and reflect about our Year 3/4 students. The year 4 students have not attended a "normal" school year since year 1 and the year 3 students have not attended a "normal" school year since they were in an ECE programme. This led me to question myself about what is normal. 

School for our year 3/4 students in a Covid world IS normal. They have never really attended school any other way. One of the things that is not normal is the norms that we generally would have used to compare student acheivement and classroom success in the past. Thinking of the things that we need to change in our teaching practice to help focus on where are students are now our staff used the analogy of a face mask. 

We have been asked to wear a mask at school from nose to chin, which presents many problems in a classroom setting. So, as we move from a Mask On to a Mask Off society, we explored what challenges we are now face with the goals that we have for our "new normal" classroom. 

Level 2 Coding

Recently, Auckland was moved to Level 2 of the NZ Covid-19 restriction levels. This means that schools have reopened with many adaptations in place. Our students are sitting in a social distancing seating chart and they are not sharing anything once they enter the classroom setting. Their hands are sanitised every time they enter and exit a classroom or building. 

In Room 1, students have arrived back to school very slowly and I only have about half of my students attending class on a daily basis. I decided that it was a great time to introduce something new and fun to my students with a Codey Rocky coding lesson. 

I am excited to share this Level 2 lesson as one of my Manaiakalani Class on Air episodes for 2020. Please click here to see the entire lesson format, including student blog posts and an extended lesson plan. 

Lockdown Maths

 As a team, we have decided to try something a bit different with our classes at this point in the lockdown. We are meeting with our Maths Class three times a week on a Google Meet, and we have decided to try breaking down our learning task and teaching points into smaller chunks of information to be presented throughout the week that will build upon each other to create a complete mathematical concept. 

While planning for this week of Geometry, I wanted to be sure that I was asking students to complete tasks while supplies that they all had available to them while at home. I found that in order to keep things consistent (to help the students helping each other from different homes) with the manipulatives they were using was key. Therefore, I decided to find online tools for us to use to help build our geometric knowledge. 

Class on Air: Writing From Home

With our country in Level 4 lockdown, in response to the Covid-19 epidemic, teachers are learning how to effectively adapt their pedagogy to ensure that their students are learning from home. For those of us in Manaiakalani schools, we are exploring new ways to have students participate in our Learn, Create, Share pedagogy from home. In addition, our Manaiakalani Class on Air team was challenged to begin thinking outside of the box when designing our lessons during this period of distance learning. 

This past week, our country celebrated Anzac Day as we do each year. However, this year, due to the lockdown things were a tad bit different across the country. As a result, the lesson that I prepared for my students was also a tad bit different. 

Check out my Manaiakalani Class on Air episode where students were encouraged to come up with a way to make their own poppy or poppy display around their house. After creating their poppy, students were tasked with writing step by step instructions and presenting those instructions in a creative manner on their blogs. 

Holiday Lockdown Learning Journey

 This term, we had to think of our Term 1 holidays a little differently. We were released from school a few weeks early, to stay at home in our bubbles in order to keep NZ safe from Covid-19. Our students were just beginning to settle into Level 4 lockdown life and were starting to understand what it meant to be distance learning from home. Although the teachers of Team 5 really were looking forward to a week off of school, we understood that we needed to capitalise on the learning that our students had started to be involved in while at home. As a result, some teachers on our team created our "Easter Learning Journey" directly based on former Manaiakalani Summer Learning Journey tasks. 

I hope you take some time to check out my Class on Air episode that shares this learning journey with you, along with my personal elaborated lesson plans, reflections and student blog post examples. 

Distance Learning: Friday Spelling Test

One of the things that we are trying to do for our students is keep things as normal as possible but from home. On a normal Friday, we have a schoolwide assembly and generally after we have a Teamwide spelling test that is administered over the PA system by our amazing office staff.

So, today we decided it would be fun to have our own Distance Learning team assembly complete with karakia, mihi and waiata as we would any other day of the school term. It was great to see so many students hop on and join us this morning, especially since it was at 9am! 

NOTE: Names have been blocked out because it is not Cybersmart to post last names online!

It was fun seeing some faces that I don't see in my general literacy and maths classes as we spent about 30 minutes together. Mrs. Flavelle from our office staff joined us and administered our spelling test. The students completed the test using a Google Form, which allowed their answers to be submitted right away. As always, the students with a perfect score will be entered into a drawing to win a special treat once we are back at school.

GOOGLE MEET TIP: 

We are learning as we go along, and one of the coolest things we have learnt is to download the Chrome Extension "Google Meet Grid View" This is a great tool when you are meeting with more than 4 students so that you are able to see everyone in one view. 

Distance Team Meetings

That's right! We are also meeting together as the team of teachers from our intermediate block using Google Meet. It is important that we keep in contact with each other in order to continually make what we are doing better and to ensure the our own well-being is looked after.

We are our own community of learners as we branch out into this new way of teaching for us, and we are our best supporters. Especially, as we are now learning not only how to run a distance learning classroom with intermediate students but how to do it from home while juggling our own families and flat mates who are also all home and wanting our attention.

As we branch into our new normal, I am so thankful to be doing it with the lovely ladies of Team 5 at PES. 

Online Distance Teaching - Covid 19

The past few weeks the world has seen dramatic change in our everyday lives. As a result of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, the teachers on Team 5 at Pt. England School spent time speculating about what it would look like if we had to teach our students from home. We then spent many hours planning, and developing what we felt would be the best way to do this while keeping in mind the daily structure and routine that our students are already accustomed to.

After receiving some advice and tips from our Manaiakalani support near the end of Week 7, we thought we had a plan to run with. We decided to change our regular team site to our distance learning plan for Week 8 so that students would be used to seeing it and working from it. We were waiting for the go ahead to introduce our students to Google Meet/Hangouts, that we thought would come after our school wide staff meeting scheduled for Monday after school before demonstrating for students what distance learning would look like the next morning (Tuesday of Week 8).

Our first Google Meet on 24/3/20 at 9am

Little did we know, life in New Zealand was about to be drastically changed after a news conference that began halfway through our lunch hour on Monday afternoon. It was announced that our nation was moving to a level 3 for 48 hours before a final isolation lock down of Level 4 for four weeks. This meant that we were no longer going to have the chance for a run through of Google Hangouts/Meet with our students before they were at home.

Our students were sent home Tuesday with a newsletter stating that school would be closed to students for the next four weeks and to staff after Wednesday. We now had 48 hours to ensure that all students had what they needed to continue learning from home.

It also meant that at 9am Tuesday morning the six teachers of Team 5 went live with our students using Google Meet.  We decided that this week would just consist of checking in with our kids twice a day checking that they were well, answering any assignment related questions, and ensuring that they understood the importance of staying at home. We are also keeping in contact with our students using Hapara Dashboard to comment on student's work and blog posts, as well as answering student questions through email.