Mr. Z's Grade 4 Class – Remote Learning Update #4

Welcome to the first week of online remote learning, with an emphasis on the online! The Google Classrooms have been set up, the passwords distributed (mostly). It's time to rock and roll! 

The routines I introduce this week will take a little bit for us all to get used to, so please contact me if you have any problems accessing the work or understanding the process. They are also new for me, so I aim to tweak and improve this as we go.

This is Week #4 of remote learning, so all the work provided will be labeled as “Week #4.”

There will be two pieces to this process:

* Remote Learning Week #4 Parent-Caregiver Guide – this guide, in a PDF file attached to this e-mail message, is an overview of the week’s work. It will be delivered Sunday nights;

* The actual work materials – these are posted in your student’s Google Classrooms with a name that refers to the week number. I set up four Google Classrooms for us to work in: Reading and Writing, Math and Science, Typing Club, and Specials and Other Cool Stuff.

For this first week especially, I ask that you sit with your child to review the work in the Google Classrooms. Please read all the instructions in there, especially for how to find and work with the materials, which can be a little tricky the first time. My goal is that once we get past this initial learning curve, students will be fairly self-sufficient and know exactly what they can work on each week and how to get to it, with you checking in on their progress.

Finally, Massachusetts State and Northampton School District officials recommend that elementary students have about three hours of school work and related activities on days that school would normally be in session. I hope to provide an increasing amount of offline activities as we get up to speed so that students are not staring at a computer screen the entire time.   

OTHER IMPORTANT TIDBITS

* Please look at this linked PDF about Northampton’s Food Distribution Program. There are some important program changes that will hopefully make it easier for folks to take advantage of these resources.

* Feel free to contact me at my new phone line (413) 342-1490. You can also email me at jzyskowski@northampton-k12.us