Tuesday was World Teachers Day. I had not realized until a student emailed me an apple!

On World Teachers Day a few years ago, a student of mine asked me who was the first teacher and who taught them? This was such a great question and we spent quite a bit of time talking about it in our class. 

The class decided that even though there are some very famous ‘first’ teachers in all different cultures, they could not have been the first teachers as someone would have taught them something and someone else would have taught them something and so on and so on. A student said you don’t need to be a teacher to teach and another one said you don’t even need to be a human because animals teach animals. And then we found out that even trees teach trees! 

So while we know that as teachers we are not the only ones teaching, we are fortunate that we get to devote our professional lives to such an important and rewarding act. It is not the easiest time to be a teacher or student at the moment and I am very proud of how well we continue to adapt and keep learning happening.

We all know we are doing our best…. even when we are not at our best!

Check in. How am I? What do I need? How are they? What do they need from me?

Ask for help and be helpful.

Be present and patient. Take time to fully understand others and allow time for others to understand you. Pausing, Paraphrasing and Posing Questions promotes our common understanding.

Share your ideas and be open to the ideas of others. Once shared, they become our ideas and anything could happen!

ES COLLABORATIVE AGENDA

Please add any questions, items that come to mind to this ES Collaborative Agenda. The idea is that once we have a few things to discuss that can’t be addressed by email, we will meet.

 Quarter 1 Progress Reports

 Quarter 1 Grade Level Standards Checklists

Looking Ahead

Quarter 2 Interdisciplinary Units

Quarter 2 begins after the Thadingyut break on Monday, October 25.

The last piece of the interdisciplinary puzzle was Social Studies content – i.e. what to teach! This has been solved with a free resource from Core Knowledge. 

We will talk about this more in Monday morning’s faculty meeting. For now, I want to share with everyone an ES Scope and Sequence Brainstorm (including Social Studies Core Knowledge) that we have been working on behind the scenes for Grades 1 to 5. 

This is very much a working document but please check it out to see what content will be being taught in Quarter 2. This will be very useful for specialist teachers thinking about how their subject can link to this content. There are highlighted links to the Social Studies content that will inspire the unit. Please note that this content is not the unit itself and next week we will be confirming enduring understandings and essential questions that will be drive the unit. I will explain more on Monday.

 Parent Teacher Conferences

Wednesday, November 3

 Grades 2-5 Google Classroom Set Up

 Friday Emails + Offline Learning

We will send out our Grade Level Friday Emails next Friday, October 15.

You will find the email templates in the folders below. Please update these emails in blue by 12pm Thursday MMT.

In these folders you will also find the Offline Learning Activity templates that will be converted to a PDF to be emailed out every Friday. If you need to update these offline learning activities, please do so by 12pm Thursday MMT.

• Pre-Kindergarten

• Kindergarten

• Grade 1

• Grade 2

• Grade 3

• Grade 4

• Grade 5

ES Assemblies

From the Library