Ms. Swinton's Class

Thank-you for your flexibility and enthusiasm as we begin this process of emergency distance learning! As I've mentioned, we are building toward the launch of our Google Classroom on Monday morning. This will be a very important space that will function as our online classroom. This is where you will be able to find important information, your assigned work for each week, and resources necessary to complete that work. When you first log in to the Classroom on Monday (through a link that will arrive in your educbe email that morning), the amount of work there might look overwhelming. I have decided to upload a whole week's worth of work at once, to allow you to work through it at the pace that works best for you. Some of the assignments have been split up by day of the week; this is a suggestion to help you decide what to work on when. However, it is ultimately up to you and your family how you would like to progress through. Feel free to do more than the one day's wort

Thank-you to everyone who participated in our class meeting through Google Meet this afternoon! It was definitely an interesting experience, and it was helpful to see some of the limitations of the platform. As I mentioned during the chat, I'm not sure how useful this will be for us as a class as we move forward. Where I could see it being most beneficial for us would be for small group or one-on-one meetings if people need more support or to check in about particular things. If people are interested in continuing to check in as a class in an audio-visual way, perhaps to do Circle time, we could potentially schedule monthly class meetings on Google Meet. I know people were happy to see one another's faces and to get a chance to check in! If you're looking for the Google Chrome extension that allows you to see everyone in the meeting in a grid, like my screen that I shared, this is where you can find it . For those of you who were unable to attend, I decided not to record th

Hello again Grade 5 Families! To reiterate and expand upon the email that was sent out earlier today about our class meeting tomorrow on Google Meet: Our meeting time is:  Thursday, April 2 at 2:00 pm Instructions for accessing Google Meet can be found here , and I will be sending the meeting link out tomorrow just before the meeting time via email. (I will email it to student and  parent email accounts, so feel free to check whichever one is easier for you.) All you'll need to do is click on the link at 2:00 and log in using your educbe email address. I understand that not all students will be able to attend this virtual class meeting at the scheduled time. If that is the case for your family, please don't worry! The intention of this meeting is to explore this new platform, reconnect as a class, provide a space for students to share about what they've been up to, and start talking a little bit about what the next weeks might look like. I will also be record

It was so lovely to connect with so many of you on the phone today! I will still be working my way through the class list tomorrow, as well as circling back to those of you I was unable to get ahold of today, so you can expect to hear from me soon if you haven't already! I will likely be showing up on your call display as "No Caller ID" or "Unknown Number," so please do answer if you see that! The intention of this phone call is just to check in on how you and your family are doing and to see if you have any questions following yesterday's email. I will also be setting up a Google Meet for our class for Friday afternoon, to give us all a chance to connect and chat, as well as to try out this new and useful platform for us! More details about this class meeting will be coming soon! Thank-you for your continued support and flexibility as we explore these uncharted waters together!

Hello Grade 5 Families!!! I hope that you had a wonderful Spring Break!! I sent out an important email just now through School Messenger, so please be sure to check for that! Please let me know if you did not receive it, and I can forward it to you individually. Thank-you for the quick responses that I have already received from some of you! I will also be phoning families over the next couple of days to check in and respond to any questions from the email. Please know that you are missed at school, but that we are really excited about what lies ahead for us! Stay tuned for more details through this coming week! Thanks as well to all of the students who continue to email me updates about what you've been up to during Spring Break and while classes have been canceled! I love hearing from you all! If you're looking for ways to keep learning at home before we start our formal assignments on Monday, here are some suggestions for you: Practice your basic facts! (Don&#

This will be my last blog post until Monday, March 30, as the school will be closed for Spring Break next week. I just wanted to share a really neat idea that I found online and that some of you might be interested in doing! Basically the idea is to keep a journal throughout this unusual time of self-isolation and canceled classes and changed plans. In this journal, you can write about how you're spending your time while not at school - the activities that you're doing to keep yourself occupied, the shows you're watching, games you're playing, books you're reading and so on. You can write about how the rest of you family is handling this time as well, and what it means for your parents and their jobs. How is your life different now than it was even a week or two ago? How is this pandemic impacting you personally? How are you feeling about this? You can go as deep as you would like! This could become a collection of writing just for yourself, that you can look back