Lockdown teaching

 As term 3 draws to a close and we are still in alert level 3 in Auckland I have taken some time to reflect what we have been producing for our team content wise. The things that have worked well are changing the topic up each day for the students and giving them the option to decide which order they can complete the daily tasks each day. Having access to an article and response to text each day has also been a big highlight with my class and they have enjoyed learning something new each day. As a team we have been pondering how to make this accessible to all of our learners and the differentiated reading levels of our students. This so something that we will spend the holidays working on and trying to structure this in a way that hopefully will make the transition to level 2 (hopefully next term) a little bit easier on our students. 

We have continued to use the model of a new topic each day with collaborative planning across the team. This has ensured that each of our students have access to quality reading, writing and maths tasks each day. Continuing on with having four facts each day this allows every student to feel like they have accomplished some learning today while doing reading and research at the same time. We have found that numbers of our students have been dropping off towards the end of the term so have decided to have this last week as a fun movie learning week which the students have been really excited about!

Reading with small groups during our google meets has been really effective and the students have loved coming together in smaller groups to read aloud and discuss the stories and articles that we have been looking at. 

Hopefully next term we will be able to reenter our classes and try and regain some sense of normality with our learning. This term has definitely been an interesting one and we are really hoping that we will be able to get back to level 2 close to the beginning of the term. Due to the uncertainty we will continue to be ready to teach online but I know like many of my fellow Auckland teachers we would love to be back in the class with our learners as soon as possible!