ROOM 3 - Grade 5/6 - Capitol Hill School

      September 18th, 2021   Welcome to a new school year in Room 3! I am delighted to be back in the classroom after teaching Grade 5 online last year.  Stay posted for new   additions to this blog as we get back onto the swing of things.  Please do not hesitate to reach out to me by email if you have any questions!   jmsloman@cbe.ab.ca

It is hard to believe that we have completed a whole month of remote learning. Thank you for your continued dedication and your hard work (both students and parents). Education content for at-home learning opportunities will continue to focus on language and mathematics outcomes. There will be opportunities to incorporate science and social studies outcomes through cross-curricular learning, as we have been doing with reading on Kids A-Z and Currents4Kids. Some families have been asking for additional science resources and activities.  Here is a list of good websites: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/teacher-resources/lesson-plans?gclid=CjwKCAjwwMn1BRAUEiwAZ_jnEqHOI5zjK0p9PLBPXLbpO07oK8muhtW26Nj7K88SuTYuSlb3Pz35vxoCHyMQAvD_BwE https://wonderville.org/ https://www.sciencekids.co.nz/ https://sciencebob.com/category/experiments/ https://www.exploratorium.edu/learn https://www.canada.ca/en/services/science/educationalresources.html (The Science Acti

WORKING TOGETHER A big thank you to parents, caregivers, and older siblings for helping students with this transition to a new way of learning. As teachers, when we plan online learning activities, we have to think about both the content and any potential technical issues that students may encounter.  We are continuing to work on making this new way of learning increasingly organized and easier to manage. Your patience and understanding is very much appreciated! GMAIL One area some students and parents have acknowledged as challenging is dealing with the Gmail inbox. At our last Google meet, students helped each other with different suggestions as to how to manage this. A quick tip is to delete notifications once you have read them and answer emails that need a response. To keep the inbox manageable, delete what you do not need. PARENT INVOLVEMENT These are exceptional times and while it’s important for children to keep learning, there is no expectation that th

Our First Google Meet! After an extensive week of planning and setting things up in our new online classroom, we have had a great deal of success figuring things out together.  Today, most students were online for our first homeroom Google Meeting!  It was so wonderful to see everyone’s faces and to hear student voices once again.  We shared our pets - and art - and various other things with each other, as well as several pieces of music – piano playing and guitar. In our meeting we had a lot of discussion about submitting and “unsubmitting” written assignments, such as our reading responses. Here’s what we have figured out so far. -        Unless a student receives a grade for an assignment, when an assignment is returned to them, they should “unsubmit” it. -        They should have received feedback from the teacher (the same as what would happen back at school) on that assignment. -        The next step is to act on that feedback and submit the assignment agai

Hello families, Students have been doing an amazing job navigating the first couple of days of online learning.  We are all figuring things out as we go.  Please do not worry if it is taking your online learner a bit longer to figure out how to get work done and turned in.  It is a challenge for all of us and we want to move forward slowly but purposefully, being able to provide students and parents with needed support. Students can communicate with me by posting a private comment while working on an assignment, ask a question of both the teacher and their classmates publicly on “the stream” or request to meet through Google Meet.  Parents, if you would like to speak with me, please send me an email with a preferred phone number and a few suggestions for approximate times and we will get it arranged.  A reminder: you will receive a call from an unknown caller at that time. I wanted to give you an idea of how things will move forward during the week of April 6 th to

WELCOME BACK! Some of the many geese landing out at my son's farm yesterday! Hello students.  Welcome back from March break. I miss you all and look forward to reconnecting with you in the next week! Even though some of the things in our world have changed so much in just a few short weeks, nature has kept its beauty - I hope you have a chance to get outside and enjoy some of it during this challenging time.  Sadly for us all, school is one of those things that has changed.  Learning will certainly look different for the next while! However, we will using Google Classroom as a platform to go back to school - from home.  It will take all of us a bit of time to adjust to this change, but I know that we as a class can provide support to each other during this time when concerns about disease spread have closed our schools.  I have every confidence in our ability to face this challenge in our lives.  Remember - people are working together, we are all looking