School Closure

Schools Are Closing for Coronavirus. Now What?
Education may be disrupted, but that doesn’t mean our kids have to lose out. (New York Times)

Dear Parents,
Hopefully you are all keeping well and remaining highly vigilant during this pandemic.  You would have all received the message from school that OIS will remain closed for the foreseeable  future and that on-line learning or ‘school from school’ learning will take place from Monday 23rd March.
This is the first time I have been involved in leading anything like this in a school and I hope that we do the best we can to make sure that your children are still learning even though they are not in school.  From our home survey for access to technology, 458 parents completed the survey; most responded positively to the question about access to devices.  Whilst having access is important for distant learning to happen, we are insisting that teachers share a balance of both on-line and offline learning engagements; we don’t want teachers to become parents, we don’t want to cause family stress and we don’t want our Primary children spending too long in front of a screen.  Please remember that this type of learning will look very different from a typical school day.
From Sunday evening, teachers will be contacting you about next steps, we are expected to launch our distant learning on Monday 23rd March, if you do not receive an email, don’t understand the tasks on instructions, please contact your child’s homeroom teacher in the first instance.
Teachers have worked incredibly hard over the last two weeks to ensure that we are ready to go on Monday.  Please forgive us if we make mistakes or that balancing the set tasks is proving to be an issue for your child, we are there to support you first and foremost.  As a working parent, I even experimented with using Seesaw at home with my six year old, and even for a teacher and a student who knew what they were to do, two learning engagements took us some time to complete.  So please do not feel any pressure to complete tasks but make sure your child is involved in doing the task.
I am sure you are reading many different types of advice available on the web and I hope you have found sources that are trusted, reliable and accurate.  My advice with your Primary children over the next few weeks would be:

1. Don’t panic - separate the rumours from the facts.
   
2. Organise your time.  If you can set time with your child, and let your child choose how they would like to organise their day.
   
3. Reach out to others - Use Google Hangouts to arrange times with other families - this is extremely valuable for mental health.
   
4. Motivation - Find something to motivate yourself, your family and child.  Keep it positive.
   
5. Your children will want to talk about the virus, school closure and may ask questions that you do not have the answer too.  Please don’t make up responses, as it gives a false sense of security. If you don’t know something; say “I don’t know, let's try and find out.”
   

I have also put together a video.

Please take care,

Miss Lisa Hughes
Head of Primary
Oberoi International School; JVLR campus