Week 4

Dear Parents, Friends and families,

Welcome to Week 4 of distant learning.  We hope you are doing well and getting prepared for a full week of learning.
I am hoping to share working families perspectives of how they approach distant learning with their families.  Ms Nik very kindly gave us a brief perspective of how her days rolled out with her family.  She is very lucky to have access to outside space!

Some families may be experiencing 'cabin fever' and may be starting to experience both a positive and negative approach to distant learning. 
I read an interesting article that may help you gain perspectives about this:  www.huffpost.com/entry/covid-19-virtual-distance-remote-learning-kid-challenges_l_5e8735d4c5b6a94918354752.

Planning a field trip - thank you to the parent who shared ideas for virtual field trips, what a great idea!

​As you can see in my Week 4 video, we are considering feedback on how to provide more opportunities for students to 'see' or interact with their students. For now, our approach is that Grade 4 and 5 students have virtual access to their HRT on a daily basis at set times.
Nursery to Grade 3 videos are mostly pre-recorded.  

Next week, we shall embark on Virtual Care Calls (VCC).  On Monday 20th April, HRTs or point of contact teachers will be sending out a sign up sheet for students to talk with their HRTs one-on-one.  The calls are optional for parents and not mandatory and we won't be organising different times for parents who cannot make it.

Once a parent has signed up for a time, teachers of nursery to Grade 3 families will send out an invite via Google Meet (we will not be using Zoom).  Grades 4 and 5 can use Google Hangouts.  Each meeting will be with 1 parent and 1 student for 15 minutes.  

The purpose of the meeting is to find out what the home environment is like, how the child is doing and for the child to say hello live to the HRT.  It is a meeting between the HRT/POC and the child, but 1 parent must be present. 

I will send out some guidelines to parents to help understand.  It is not an opportunity for teachers to explain tasks or receive feedback from the parents.  If the parents have feedback for you, they need to put it in writing, this is not for the VCC.

The sign up sheet will need to be shared with parents on Monday 20th, April at 8am.
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What do parents need to do?

• Sign up for a time for the VCC
• ​Make sure you have access to Google Meet
• Please support your child to attend the online meeting.
• The meeting is a time for your child to meet with their teacher. 
• Communicate concerns or questions with the teacher via their Oberoi email, not through this meeting.
• Do not record the meeting under any circumstances. 
• The ‘VCC’ should last no longer than 15 minutes.
• The teacher will not be able to resolve technical issues during the morning meeting. If you have any technical issues email a screenshot and as much information as you can to OISIT@oberoi-is.org and CC your child’s teacher. 

Many thanks,
​Miss Lisa.