Lockdown Relationships and Hero Reporting

 Lockdown Relationships

Maintaining relationships was definitely made more difficult through the level 4 lockdown. With only email and phone conversations available it was definitely difficult to maintain relationships not only with students but also with their parents. It was extremely important to make sure we were there to support the families and students during this difficult time. I called all families multiple times, though I found that email was a better form of communication for most families. I communicated through email and through the linc ed hero emailing system also. I managed to maintain good communication with around half of the families in my class. They all knew that I was there if they needed me and some preferred to just keep to themselves and their own family. Others emailed me with questions and also with a request for a phone call as they wanted more information. I wanted to be there to support but I also didn’t want to annoy anyone by trying to contact them too many times so I tried to just follow their lead.

Nicole and I alternated each day between who would do the daily video as we felt it was important for them to see both of our faces. We also sent virtual fish tickets for students who were doing Mathsbuddy, Sunshine books or sending us photos or work from what we had posted for thats days learning on our site. It was cool sending the fish ticket to them and parents would respond which was very cool. Some of the children were printing them out and putting them up on their fridges.

It was really to cool to see students commenting via their parents on other students blog posts of work that we were putting up too.

When Nicole and I returned to school at level 3 it was great as we were able to do the videos together and host zoom sessions with the class which we really enjoyed and we played games of scavenger hunts and tried singing songs and doing tik toks together, these creating the fun element and allowed for the children to communicate with us and each other.

We also had a junior hub talent show and tell during our home learning time and we had lots of buy in from it and I then created a slide deck so we could share it for everyone to see I called it Whakatau Super Talents.

Linc Ed Hero Reporting

We took this unusual time and chose to document it through our reporting this term and share with families some of the key things that the students had taken away from the very unusual but also very special time at home, below you can see examples of this.