Weekly update from Primary

Making connections through the Listening Conferences

It has been wonderful seeing many of our families on campus or virtually this week during the Listening Conferences. As shared in last week's post, these conferences are a wonderful opportunity for creating connections between home and school. The Listening Conferences have become particularly important because we have opened the school year via Distance Learning. These conferences give students and families the chance to meet the new homeroom teacher, discuss how the Distance Learning experience is going so far, and share any other information that would help support the student. We have had a number of families sign up for a conference this week. If you have not done so already, please access this sign-up sheet for an available slot. If you need to arrange one for the following week, please coordinate directly with your child's homeroom teacher.

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Engagement with Distance Learning

Over the past week, each teacher has been updating our records that indicate which students are engaging in our synchronous, Real-Time Distance Learning path, which students are connecting asynchronously through our Flexible Distance Learning path, and which students are doing a combination of both. We understand that various circumstances may present themselves on different days (power outages, internet connectivity challenges, illness, travel) so please note that there is flexibility and fluidity built into the paths. Class Meets and mini-lessons will be recorded and can be accessed through your child's Google Calendar on their iPad. Students will also find recorded instructions for each learning engagement posted on Seesaw should they not be able to join a live Meet.

We are extremely pleased to see the consistent engagement from students, not only with the homeroom lessons, but in the specialist lessons as well. We aim to provide a well-rounded, holistic program so we are grateful to see that students are equally engaging with the arts, modern languages, physical education, library and information technology as part of their learning each week.

In the coming weeks, we ask that families keep us updated on any changes to their situation (location, travel plans, asynchronous vs synchronous engagement). We have also begun adding some Q&As on our Distance Learning Set-up and Support website page to share responses to some commonly asked questions pertaining to Distance Learning. We invite you to check that periodically if you have a question about something. If you do not find a response to your question, please feel free to reach out to us. We are here to help.

Until next week,
Darlene Huson, Primary Principal
Tony Potts, Primary Assistant Principal/ IT Integration Specialist
Christine Kelly, Primary Assistant Principal/ PYP Coordinator ​