Greetings Everyone,

The past couple of days I have been working with staff and administration on processes and procedures as we move forward.  My background is distributed online learning at both the university and the elementary school level, so I ready to move forward, and as home learning parents, I know you all have things covered as well!  There is much angst wtihin the mainstream school community though, and I feel for them.

If you have not already, you should be receiving an invitation to sign up for Epic! for free through my Educator account.  Epic! will be free for your child to use until June 30th.  If you do not receive your email invitation directly from them, please let me know and I will get that done.  Also, Epic for Kids FB page hosts live readings with activities.  They have teachers reading stories and leading activities live on their page.  I highly recommend these as they are all planned out and led by teachers: https://www.facebook.com/epic4kids?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_1117765 

Many families have suggested I use Zoom during this time, and I need to let you know that I cannot use Zoom for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, Zoom does not comply with Canadian Privacy laws.  I feel very strongly as an educator that anything I use with children must have, as one of its basic tenets, robust privacy laws for the protection of my students.  The second reason is that the Vancouver School Board does not support it and also does not want us to use it.  They are providing Microsoft Teams, which the VSB IT department is also fully supporting, so that if we run into any difficulties, they will be there to assist us.

I hope everyone is staying well.  Be kind to yourself, it is an extraordinary, stressful time.