As I am writing this from my kitchen at home; I do seem to notice more traffic noises coming from the roads around my apartment block. The Movement Control Order now has the ‘C’ for conditional in front of it, making it the CMCO. However, that unfortunately has not signalled a return to the school building at Puchong for our community yet. Schools are still not allowed to operate and a return date for the children has not yet been set. This has meant that for some families there have been changes over the last week with a number of parents resuming work outside their home. That has presented some families with new challenges that they have shared with us. For the moment we are still dependent on home learning and it needs to be carried out in the daytime. Home learning still can’t occur without access to devices that are connected to the internet. We will however try to accommodate as much as possible. Teachers will, for example, record more sessions and make them available to the students. There are also a number of activities on Story Park, See-Saw and Google Classrooms that can be flexible in timings. It remains vital that parents and children stay in contact with the class teacher so that he/she can understand your situation.
I personally have welcomed the opportunity to exercise away from my living room as the inside routines were getting quite tedious! The relaxing of some measures and lifting of others has also led to some people questioning whether it is safe enough to already ease some of the measures that were taken. The virus has impacted us all and it is only natural that we are still anxious about possible infections and/or a second wave spreading over the country again. Please be assured that, upon return, the school will do everything it can to create the safest environment possible for our community. Preparations for that have already started. This will obviously be an effort that will concern us all so all ideas, thoughts, suggestions and concerns are very welcome!
The Primary leadership team has held online meetings with parents of all year groups over the past few weeks. The aim was to make sure that we stay connected as much as possible. That is obviously much harder now that we can’t just see each other under the roof of our school building. Thank you to all the parents who took time out of their schedules to engage with us in conversation. I personally very much enjoyed those meetings and we managed to receive a great amount of very useful feedback.
Which brings me to the topic of the second questionnaire on the school under the MCO that went out last Monday. We are very grateful for all the parents that have already filled in the questions. Their answers provide us with valuable data that we can use to evaluate our current offering and contemplate further on possible improvements. Those who have not been able to do so yet, your contribution would be much appreciated and there is still time to fill in the questionnaire.
One of the questions in this questionnaire is the issue of how satisfied you are with home learning. This is obviously an important question for us. I just would like to clarify that the question is not about if you are content with home learning or that you would prefer to have learning in school. We all prefer learning in school! We would like to know, whilst understanding the limitations of on-line learning versus being in school, how well we are doing in providing learning online. In short, we can’t be in school so how well are we doing with providing education from a distance?
Our leadership are continuously monitoring the quality of our online sessions and ‘sit in’ on many of these lessons. Over the last couple of weeks, I have also managed to watch a good number of lessons myself. I witnessed a number of sessions that showed me that these interactions can still pique curiosity, can still be engaging, still be interesting and can still provoke deep learning. I am impressed with the great work that so many of our teachers are carrying out and thank them for their creativity, adaptability and flexibility!
I hope everybody will enjoy a super long weekend. I still have so many picture-book stories that I would love to share with the children. For that reason, I will read one book on Zoom on Thursday, Friday and Monday (2 PM) before we return to online learning on Tuesday. The invite has gone out via REMIND. I hope to see many children joining me as these stories are great fun!
