Welcome to the Specialists@Webex                                                     7 June, 2021

Thank you to all our parents for your efforts in supporting your children's Learning from Home. As there is no expectation that parents take on the role of teachers, we try to make the LFH tasks as easy-to-follow as possible and support these with the online teacher presence.

Today was our first 'groups' day, allowing your child to have a more personal experience with their teacher in their online classroom. As well as their group session, teachers began individual sessions with their students, as would happen in their real classroom at school. In the groups I visited, it was great to see so much involvement from our students.

Although we're unsure what will happen with the Circuit Breaker Lockdown after Thursday, we will publish Thursday and Friday LFH pages as soon as they are ready, just in case. Last week we published Thursday and Friday separately, but this was purely in response to the unfortunate timing of government announcements.

Based on feedback from families last year, we are going to trial some specialist classes online. These optional sessions are scheduled so they do not clash with Webex class meetings and will start tomorrow.

Each specialist teacher is offering a 25-minute class to each of the sub-schools (Prep, Year 1/2, Year 3/4 and Year 5/6). Parents can find a ‘Specialists’ page with each sub school’s day, time and password information on our website, attached to your child's LFH pages. Just log into the same location as you usually do for LFH to find these. These sessions are also being added to our Event Calendar as recurring events until the end of term, again, just in case.

During Specialists@ Webex, we are aiming to provide an opportunity for students to touch base with Music, Art, Spanish, Library and P.E. teachers. These sessions are intended to be fun and engaging for students.

We’re not sure how many students will log into these sessions, but please be mindful that there are up to 220 students invited to attend, depending on the sub school. Never was a mute function so useful, as students will need to be demonstrating active listening during these sessions.

You may have also noticed that there are specialist teachers sitting in on classroom Webex meetings, with each specialist allocated to a year level. This is so that they can take a session if a class teacher is absent. Thank you to all our specialist teachers again for their flexibility.

Just before the lockdown was announced, our staff reviewed the progress of children who were nominated for the Tutor Learning Initiative this semester. Although this review was undertaken as a planning tool, it has been very useful in prioritising tutors’ focus areas this week.

From today, three of our tutors began working individually with some students whose engagement we are particularly keen to maintain during lockdown. If your child is targeted for these individual intervention sessions, you will have already received an email from one of our tutors with meeting details.

We had minimal technical issues last week and believe those have all been resolved, thanks to our resident expert! Nevertheless, we remind parents that the school value of Resilience is also included in our Learning to Learn Positive Behaviours matrix, so that any technical interruptions can be viewed with the realistic perspective they deserve.

As our Webex@LPS page notes, ‘If a meeting has not started 10 minutes after the official start time, or the teacher goes offline, please consider the meeting cancelled. If this does happen to you, it will most likely be due to technical issues, so please prepare your child to be resilient.’

Finally, thank you to our fantastic Parents Group and Class Reps, who are planning some class online events this week. What a great opportunity for your children to see their friends ‘outside’ of school!

Stay safe everyone.

Kim