Remote Learning Plan - 23 March to 1 April

Hello Resistance!

I will be posting images of pages that you should read to the blog every morning. These will include pages from your Maths, Reading, and Social Studies textbooks. You will need to complete these lessons on the days that they are assigned but I will give specific details about this with each post.

I will be sharing TWO Google Docs with each of you. The first will have your number and name as the title of he document. Please do not change this. This will be your daily assignment and test document. You need to take photographs of your work and upload the images to the documents under the date when they are due. I will put the dates in each document each day when assignments are due along with the title of the assignment to save you both time and confusion. Do not delete any of the assignments or images that you upload as I will need to keep everything that you submit as evidence that you were online and learning during our remote learning period.

The second document will be your Historical Fiction Google Doc. Our remote learning session could not have come at a better time as you now have more time than expected to work on your stories to make them as good as anything that Michael Morpurgo and Lois Lowry could write.

I will place a checklist at the top of each of your assignment documents so that I can check off assignments that you have completed. If you would like to add the checks yourselves, that is fine, as long as you don't add checks to things you have not submitted or completed.

I will be working on ways for us to communicate during the quarantine period other than email and Hangouts if it seems necessary, However, you are quite aware of what needs to be done in the 8 school days that we will not be seeing each other. If you are not sure of what we need to achieve, here is a list of things that we will be working on:

1. Science STEM Activity: Self-Watering Plant Project. I will take care of your seeds while you are away. You will be reminded and encouraged to check in with your partner regarding the device that you will build to keep your plant alive. I will give you time to build the device on the afternoon of Friday the 10th of April if we are able to return to school in that week. This will be the beginning of the Weekend Test period so you will still have time to work on the project the week after and we will leave the plants to survive on their own for a week after the 17th of April.
2. Social Studies Chapter 8 Project: Remember that? You need to choose someone famous or important from the 1920s and use the rubric that I provided to make a project that teaches us more about their life. I will post a copy of the rubric on the blog just in case you have misplaced or lost yours. This project will be due on the 6th of April instead of the 1st. Please use some of your time to work on this. I know that most of you started this when it was assigned a few weeks ago so please let me know if you have any questions.
3. Historical Fiction: You will have time to work on your first draft of this before we see each other again. I love this assignment because EVERYBODY should be able to make theirs interesting. I will be sharing examples of the stories of many of my previous students. You will be amazed, and hopefully inspired, by what students just like you who have passed through my class are capable of if they use War Horse, Number The Stars, Katie's Trunk, and Elena as guides. We will work through any of these that we have not covered in the next few days. 
4. International Expo: Mrs. Lines and I have both promised you that your efforts have not been in vain. We will still be presenting to the other students about Saudi Arabia but we need to decide which day when we return would be best. Please do keep checking in with members of your group about ideas that could be added to your posters or activities. If you need anything printed, please share a document with me and I will keep all of it until I see you in person again, We will devote a good amount of time on the first day back to finishing the posters and testing out your games/activities before the big day. 
5. Assessments: There will be TWO assessments administered this coming Friday, the 27th of March. These are the Maths Topic 13 test and the Number The Stars End-Of-Book Assessment. I am aware that many of you need to share computers and other devices with your parents and siblings. For this reason, you will be given the Maths test as a Take Home test (I will post the questions on the blog early on Friday morning with instructions) and you will be given one hour to complete the Number The Stars assessment. I will count the hour from the moment you type your first answer into the document that I provide as I understand that many of you will not be able to complete the assessment at the same time as the rest of the class if your siblings might need to use the family computer for their own online learning sessions. Remember, this is largely an awareness assessment, so you are urged not to contact friends for help with the answers. 
6. For Science, we will not be making as much use as usual of the textbook but you may use it to complete the test on Tuesday. As you will remember, the previous test was written as an Open Book test too and many of our fellow Robustanians made avoidable mistakes on this. You need to complete the hard copy test that I gave you yesterday and upload photographs of each page of the test to your assignment document before 9PM on Tuesday, the 24th. 
7. Science Report: I will be sharing three videos with you and assigning an Achieve 3000 article about a disaster in the Ukraine in 1986. The purpose of this is to take a look at one example of how humans have impacted the environment in such a way that it made a large part of the Ukraine uninhabitable by humans since the disaster in 1986 because of a nuclear reactor leak. This is a very interesting topic (and one of the videos describes the possibility of radioactive wolves) and I hope that you will contribute comments to the blog post when I upload the videos. I will give you instructions for what your report should look like later in the week. Don't be scared of the report. I will give detailed instructions for what to do and the due date will be after we return to school so that I can give you feedback.

This does seem like a lot of work but it is what we would have covered in the next two weeks anyway. I am always available to to answer questions though my responses will be most swift between 7AM and 4PM. To make interaction as easy as possible, we can also communicate through comments in Google Docs and the comments section on the blog throughout normal school hours. Please be sure to restrict questions and comments about Maths to the Maths block I specified in my previous email to you and apply the same to Literacy, Social Studies, and Science. 

Although we will not be in the same room for a while, i will be suggesting ways for you to proofread and edit each other's Historical Fiction and other assignments. Keep your eyes on the blog for details about all of this. 

Don't panic about anything that needs to be done. I am aware that this is an unfamiliar and challenging way to do all of the learning and collaboration that we usually do, but you have shown me time and again that you can adapt and keep learning in any situation. If you have any problems with getting things done on time, I will make allowances and suggestions to help you along until we see each other in person again.