I hope everyone is staying well and managing your days at home okay. I have to admit that being isolated alone is proving to be a lonely and boring experience.  I’m not as entertaining as I thought I was.  Luckily for me, though, my dogs are really good conversationalists…

I am all set up with a new work computer and a new home computer, so hopefully that was the last of my computer issues for a good, long while.  I am also delighted to let everyone know that Daniella has rejoined our class!  Welcome back, Daniella (and Katty), we missed you!

I would like to focus today’s post on answering some questions I have received from families, which are pertinent to everyone.  The first thing is allotments:   The Board is still working out how the allotment accounting should proceed moving forward, so as soon as I am given the green light, I will let everyone know.  However, as I indicated previously, don’t worry about the deadline.

School work and assessments:  As you may have read either on the VSB website or on an email sent to you from the school or the board, the basic expectation right now is that teachers provide 5-7 hours of “work” to students weekly.  I’m not sure where this number comes from – but I suspect it has as much to do with classroom teachers learning technology and how to provide digital learning as anything else.  For Home Learners, I would just say proceed as usual while keeping in mind that this is an unusual time and that we all experience stress, and the stress of this situation, differently.  Please feel absolutely free to talk to me about this at any time.

In terms of assessments, I am operating under the assumption that I will be writing end of the year report cards.  Nothing has been said about this by either the Ministry, or by the VSB to my knowledge at this time, though, so an end of the year report could end up looking quite different than what we are used to.  I don’t know what is going to happen about portfolio meetings.  I am keeping them booked on the calendar for the time being.

I am currently setting up an IXL Math class, free of charge to my students.  If you would like your child(ren) to work with IXL Math, please send me an email. It takes awhile to set a class of students up, so I will only set up those I hear from.

Also, I have heard from parents concerned about all the screen time associated with using these resources.  To that end, I will be sending out grade-level packages of weekly materials to print out and work on.  Through my educator subscription to Education.com (the same company as IXL Math), the people at Education.com have compiled weekly work packages for grades K-5.  I’ve looked through each one and I think they are pretty good.  I will email these to families.  There are not many pages to each package, and daily instructions are provided.

Finally, for today, I wanted to share this https://blog.calm.com/take-a-deep-breath