Lockdown: August - September 2021

We have spent most of this last term in lockdown due to Covid-19. During my time working from home, I have been responsible for the continuation of PENN, our Pt England Network News. I have been really fortunate to have an amazing team of children working with me to make this happen. Daily email correspondence with the children has been essential. Rather than me selecting which children are going to present each day, I have made it the responsibility of the children to commit by putting their name down to present each day. This has been really successful and there have only been a few occasions when I've had to follow up on children who have forgotten or find replacements when I can't get hold of someone.

Here is an example of the finished product:

You can see that another big part of my job from home has been to put together examples of learning that have been happening at home during lockdown. It has been great to share so much on PENN each day and to document this time in our lives! As well as looking through many children's blogs myself, I have received regular emails from some teachers with children's work they want me to share but I have also received emails from children who are proud of something they have done and want some of their learning shared. Celebration of this has been a huge part of what I have been working on from home. 

In addition to producing the news each day, I have taken my year 5 & 6 and year 7 & 8 extension classes weekly and have run Creative Space meets each week for Team 4 (year 5 & 6) and for Team 3 (year 3 & 4). On Fridays, I have run an elective class for Team 5 (year 7 & 8).

Year 7 & 8 Controversial Topic Brainstorm: Which country should some Olympic athletes compete for? Click on the link to see the children's work for one of our google meets.

I have developed a number of lessons to support children to be Creative in their learning at home:

This activity was designed for year 3 & 4 children working on Scratch. Here are some examples of children who completed the challenges from this lesson:

Hunter

- Challenge 1

- Challenge 2

- Challenge 3

- Challenge 4

Jackson

- Challenge 1

- Challenge 2

- Challenge 3

- Challenge 4

- Challenge 5

- Challenge 6

For Māori Language week, I ran a Scratch session on creating a digital pepeha/mihi. I ran this with both Team 3 and Team 4. This was a model I provided to the children for this activity:

The week after this, with the Team 3 children, I introduced the extensions that came on Scratch. Some of the children who had been doing lots of Scratch from home were really interested in this. Here is a project which Jaxon made to show how he can make his sprites draw in Scratch.

With Team 2 (year 2 children), I took google meets for each of the classes where I taught them how to do Stop Motion Animation. 

I created this 'How to' Video to support the children (and teachers) in a rewindable way:

Here are some of the fantastic finished products by children in year 2 and 3:

Tomorrow I will run this session with Team 1 (year 1 children). I will also run it with Team 3 (year 3s and 4s) and will include support to children on chrome books to teach them how they can do Stop Motion in google slides.

Keeping my inquiry going during lockdown

When we went into lockdown, I was halfway through testing the children on another picture vocabulary test. The difference was, I was providing the children with the prompt cards so they could use them if they wanted them. The results were looking really positive. But then lockdown happened. This means I'll have to wait to find out how the other children did!

Whilst in lockdown, I have still been seeing classes through google meets. This has allowed me to continue my inquiry, even if it isn't to the same momentum it had while we were physically at school. Each time I meet with my year 5 & 6 extension children, we have been exploring a different photograph.  The photographs I have chosen are ones from the New York Times: :What's going on in this picture. The children are really excited each week to talk about a new photograph and the conversation is becoming richer and richer. I have been forcing myself to take a step back, not share ideas and see how the children go with conversing around the photos. The conversation prompts are being used however usually the use of these dies off after the conversation has warmed up.

I spent some time researching other provocations that I could use with the children and I found this really cool resource called 'Once upon a picture.'

What I like about this resource is that it breaks the focus up into collections depending on what your focus is: inferring, predicting, thinking, characters etc. There is also a fantastic 'Challenge Book' which you can download. 

Season 2 of NZ's Lockdown

In a time full of seriousness and worry, there is some humour coming out. In particular, the 1pm daily update has made it onto IMDB, the well known international website reviewing movies and TV series. Amusingly, it has 2 seasons and has a rating of 9.6/10! Therefore, here I bring to you an update from inside season 2 of NZ's Covid-19 lockdown!

We have made it through the first week back in lockdown up here in Auckland. The children have been amazing - the real stars of the show! We had 20 children show up to our daily google meet today and have had 31 active children posting, commenting and attending google meets. What a success!

Once again, this latest blip in the year 2020 has caused me to stop and rethink my professional inquiry for the year. After some consideration, I am determined to continue with my focus on children and their ability to think critically. The reason for this is that in many scenarios I am noticing how much our children could benefit from learning how to think deeper about their learning. Here are some examples from the last week:

During a google meet: During a conversation about food in Canada, one child ran to their kitchen and brought back a bottle of maple flavoured syrup. They confidently declared that they had some maple syrup. Here is an approximation of the conversation:

Child 1: "I have some maple syrup" [holding maple flavoured syrup up to the screen].

Child 2: "Miss West, I don't think that is real maple syrup."

Me: "Oh, why is that?"

Child 2: Because maple syrup comes from Canada.

Me: Can you think of any other reason why it might not be actual maple syrup?

[No response]

Me: What does it say on the front of the bottle?

Child 1: Maple flavoured syrup

[No elaboration]

Me: What do you think it means by maple flavoured?

From this point on, it required a lot of prompting from me for the children to be able to contribute to a critical discussion with causal reasoning. In a group of about 12 children, only 2 children contributed fully to the discussion. In this example, there were signs of one child thinking critically, however they struggled to elaborate, add causal reasoning and justify their critical thinking.

In other examples, when children were completing a task where they had to find facts about animals in Canada, many interesting facts were found however a level of causal reasoning/ critical thinking was lacking.

Examples:

"There are Polar Bears in Canada."

No elaboration. A response that could provide elaboration could be, "There are Polar Bears in Canada because Polar bears live in cold climates. Northern Canada has an extremely cold climate with snow and ice. Polar bears thrive in this climate and eat many animals that also live in this area."

"The marmot is the most endangered animal in Canada."

No elaboration. A response that could provide elaboration could be, "The marmot is the most endangered animal in Canada. This could be because of predators that eat the marmot or it could also be due to such issues as climate change or humans destroying parts of their habitat. To understand this more, we could look at whether temperatures have changed much in the area of Canada where the marmot lives or whether their habitat has been threatened by humans."

These are just examples. To get children showing this level of causal reasoning or critical thinking, I could create a causal chain template for the children to learn to use and work through when working on tasks. This causal chain template could be something to help the children when working independently. This will be important, particularly when we don't know how Covid-19 could impact us going forward. 

School pre to post lockdown

What a year we have had! Let me give you a run-down of our year to date:

February-March: The year started as any year would. Our team of teachers met up in January to set up the classrooms, discussed pedagogy, set up our spaces and began planning for term 1. The school year began as normal - we welcomed our class of excited and enthusiastic children and we developed a classroom culture and expectations. The year ahead was looking great!

We began to hear talk of covid-19 causing concerns around the world. I remember the shock of hearing that America was closing it's borders to Europe and thinking how 'over-the-top' this seemed! But then we did it too! The reality of the pandemic was reaching New Zealand.

Mid-Late March: Throughout mid-late March, our numbers of children at school began diminishing. On the 21st of March, the government announces the four-level alert system. We were in alert level 2. At school, we began wondering what each new day would look like. School was beginning to look at lot different to how we knew it. 

Monday 23rd of March: Now this was a day to remember. We had about 15 children in our space which usually had 60 children. To begin with, the novelty of having such a small group of children was great! The children found it exciting that there were so few of them and we had a great morning of learning. And then at lunchtime, while the children were all out playing, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that schools would be closing the next day and that by midnight on Wednesday, we would all be in level 4 - total lockdown. The realisation of what we had to achieve in such a short time kicked in - we had to get all the chromebooks home so the children would be able to continue their learning. In the hour after lunch, we managed to send all the children who were at school home with their devices. But we still had 3/4 of our space whose devices were still at school. Over the next 48 hours, we worked to get all the chromebooks home. Parents came to pick up the devices and we did home deliveries. 

Wednesday 25th - Friday 27th of March: School holidays were brought forward. We spend these three days before the holidays hooking our children into learning from home. We jumped straight into google meets multiple times in the day to support children with their online learning.

After the 2 week break for the children (during which a holiday blogging experience was set up), we were straight back into online learning. Our site changed so the children were accessing all of their learning from the same page of the class site (rather than separate pages for each learning area). We were producing new content each day for the children in our class. Check out my page from lockdown by clicking this button:

On Tuesday 28th April, I returned to school for a level 3 'Bubble School Teacher Only Day.' School felt very different. Not all the staff and children were back. Three bubbles were set up, each with a small number of children. We had about 19 children in total at school.

We had to stay at least 2 metres away from anyone who was not in our bubble and we could be at least 1 metre away from anyone who was in our bubble. We had nine children in our bubble, ranging from year 2 to year 5.

Here is our website from bubble school:

While I was back at school, my class merged with another class for online learning. This is the site they continued to learn from with Miss Tuiā.

Monday 8th May: Return to school for everyone - level 2!

On Monday 8th May, school reopened for everyone!! However, school still looked very different. Over the next few weeks, the children all gradually returned. For the first few weeks, we were extremely strict with hand hygiene (hand sanitiser and hand-washing) and children were seated at least 1 metre away from each other. Children were dropped off and picked up at the gate. Our doors opened at 8am and children had to come straight to class. Our day began as normal at 8:50am and finished at an earlier time of 2:30pm. Because of the physical distancing rules that were still in place, lunch time was shortened to just half an hour.

Since we returned on Monday 8th May, we have made some big changes to how we run things in our classroom.

Having the shorter lunch time has meant that we have had children who are much more calm, settled and ready to learn in the afternoon.

The children have been so much more settled and focussed in class with everyone having a set seat. It has reduced the amount of walking around and distraction. The noise level in class has been remarkably quieter as well. 

We have also changed the way we have organised learning for the children. As a team, our five teachers are collaborating to create detailed independent tasks. Each week, there is a new topic and this topic is developed throughout the week. The structure of this independent task is similar from week-to-week. You can explore our team site here. Hover over the home button in the banner to see the different weeks of work (from week 6 to week 12):

Having well-planned independent work with new content each day has allowed us to have more focussed time with the children we are meeting with in a group. We have been able to focus on the group in front of us.

This has been such a big take-away from the experience of lockdown. Our children were able to manage themselves so well in their learning from home, using our class site. The transition from school to home learning was able to be smooth and they were empowered in their learning. The focus we saw from our children during lockdown was able to continue as we came back to school with a similar independent task model. The only different was that we were able to see groups again rather than being on google meets 4 times a day.

Going into term 3: Going into term 3, it is going to be really interesting to see what we embrace and keep from this experience. The big question will be how we set up out classroom spaces from next term. Currently, we do not have a mat space. However, this has actually been beneficial for our children. The lack of transitions around the physical space has kept our children settled and more focussed. In terms of our online space, we will be continuing with the weekly independent inquiry topics, however this will be based around our school term inquiry.

This 6 months has definitely been a massive year of learning, change, flexibility, resilience and an amazing opportunity to reflect on our teaching to decide what is best for the children in front of us. There have been so many opportunities to make changes for the better in education that have come out of this global pandemic.