Term 2 Episode 1 Home Learning.mov

Home Learning in Team 2 during Lockdown 2020.

This page shows the immediate teaching and learning that took place straight after the announcement that New Zealand was going into Level 4 lockdown.

The lessons that you see here occurred for the remainder of Term 1's Week 8, as well as the subsequent 2 weeks of 'school holidays'.

Reflection

I am very proud of the way that my team of teachers quickly learnt how to create the content required to enable 'Learning at Home'. We met on Tuesday the 24th of March at school, and spent the day learning how to make videos using QuickTime as well as creating our own Forms in Google Forms. With a brand new beginning teacher on the team, I am happy to say we rose to the challenge.

The repetitive nature of this content was purposeful. We wanted the children to feel a sense of security and confidence with what they were to complete, given the novelty of our learning situation. The Journal Entry 'Today I feel... because...', while being completed online instead of in their Writing books, was an often used structure in our class. The Maths tests were all sitting there from previous teaching and learning experiences, so the children were familiar with those. The main challenge for our learners, was moving away from using the Explain Everything app on their iPads, to attempting a Reading follow-up task on Google Forms, which we were mindful would be a challenge for many without adequate home support.

Things to Note

This content and the children's interactions with it were targeted as 'optional', given that they occurred during the 'school holiday' period of lockdown. Despite this, I believe we had grateful parents and keen children who enjoyed interacting with the content.

Obviously, not every student would have had the opportunity to access our online content due to their own situations and circumstances. The learning expectations for what can be managed at home during this time are quite different from what we would expect to see in the classroom.