What a weekend of beautiful weather. We really earned it! On
Tuesday this week I meet with our Northampton grade level team to learn how the
district wants us to proceed with remote learning for the rest of this school
year. Next week’s work offered will reflect any changes as required under the
new guidance.
This is Week #8 of remote learning. The overview of this
week’s new work is in the “Remote Learning Week #8 Parent-Caregiver Guide,”
available as a PDF file here. Also, this message and
all the previous weekly Remote Learning Parent-Caregiver Guides are always
available on my class blog at bssroom302.blogspot.com.
NEW THIS WEEK
* It’s about time we give this Zoom thing a little whirl with
the class. I set up an inaugural Zoom
meeting for the kids for Monday May 4 at
11 am. Our agenda for this meeting will be to say hello, do a quick share, and
try to familiarize the kids with a couple of basic features in the Zoom
platform. I emailed all families a meeting invite with the Zoom web link this
past Friday. I will also post the meeting link in our Google Classroom
“Specials, Talk with Mr. Z and Other Cool Stuff” where the kids can access it
on their own.
* In this week’s Scholastic News issue I have an activity for
students to write an opinion essay based on one of the articles. What’s new is
that I created a graphic organizer students can work in that uses identical
language as we used back at school in January. I hope this will better support
the kids as they engage in this important type of writing. The opinion essay
structure is a great foundation for all forms of higher grade and college academic
writing (really just all sorts of communication). If they can emerge from this
school closure period as better opinion essay writers, that will be a win in my
book.
OTHER IMPORTANT NOTES
* Phys Ed teacher Kathy Flaherty has teamed up with other NPS
educators to create a district Physical Education website. The web address is:
The site has new activities updated weekly. Some of the links
on the site can be a little tricky. Sometimes you have to hover your cursor or
pointer on just the right part of an image, often the top right-hand corner, to
access the link to the resource.
* As I put more digital resources in the Google Classrooms
each week, I am working with a growing number of electronic files, drafting
oodles of written instructions, insuring proper website settings are made,
creating three different versions of assignments for different groups of
students, etc, etc. Be warned, I may make a mistake, and some file I told your
student to open or some Website I said to go visit, may not be there. Or it
won’t work the way I said it was supposed to work. In fact, I can guarantee I will make
mistakes, despite my best effort. As your student works with these materials,
please let me know if something is missing or isn’t working correctly. I’ll
send out the Class 302 Repair Crew asap!
* Now that we have been adding many posts in the various
Google Classrooms, the default view you get, called “Stream,” when you open a Classroom,
is getting very cluttered. I wanted to tell you about a little trick you can do
in Classroom to make it easier to see what work is in there. Across the center top
of every Google Classroom are the words:
Stream Classwork
People Grades. Google Classroom always gives you the
"Stream" view first. Instead, if you click on the word
"Classwork," it shows you all the work I have put in since we left
school, but it organizes it into different weeks and topics. I think it's a lot
easier to see what's there compared with the "Stream" view of this
work, which is just one big unorganized list.
As always, feel free to call or text me at my new phone line
(413) 342-1490. You can also email me at jzyskowski@northampton-k12.us
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