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.