Learning from Home with LS2

Over the last few days, like everyone else in NZ, my class and I have been teaching and learning from home. My aim for this week has been to get my class engaged and comfortable with their new 'normal'. 

In place of formal teaching, I challenged my class to collaborate online and create their own version of the Summer Learning Journey which we call our LS2 Blogging Challenges. A few years ago our student leaders created and ran their own 'Winter Learning Journey' so rather than reinventing the wheel we added to these slides. Having exemplars from students that my current class knew has helped this activity become a success as the connections to the tasks were in place. So, rather than focusing on what is all around us, we have instead been focusing on the awesomeness of Aotearoa through our virtual tour. 

75% of my learners were actively learning at home on Day 1. To keep the motivation going I added a new challenge for Day 2. Grant Ogilvie updated our school sports site with fitness challenges that can be done at home so I picked the one that encouraged my learners to complete the name challenge. A lot of us took part in this challenge (including me), with many people turning it into a whanau challenge to make it more fun. Fau and her sisters made this clip to show how they took on our LS2 fitness challenge. 

           

 Fau's blog

The emails I received on Day 2 showed me that my class enjoyed the idea of a daily challenge so I set another one for Day 3. This time I used an idea from I saw shared online from NZ Geographic to create a picture of an animal using leaves. I tweaked this by asking my students to list three facts about the animal they created. Again this was really well received.

     

                                     Sakina's blogpost                     Victoria's blogpost

These challenges have not only kept my learners engaged, but have also kept me extremely busy answering emails, giving feedback and commenting on blogs. In addition to this we have a wide variety of learning opportunities that can be accessed on our class site.

Chris and Victoria have some great examples on their blog to show how this is working.

If you would like to use any of the blogging challenges created by my awesome students, click here and make a copy.