April 1st, 2020

4/1/2020

Please see the following email, shared earlier this evening:

Good evening,

I know that I said I would try and limit emails to Mondays and Fridays, but there are few updates I thought families might appreciate receiving before Friday. First, the Fort McMurray Public School Division has recently launched the #ABLearningatHome and #FMPSDLearningatHome campaign. We would love to see photos of students and families learning at home. More specifically:

Posts that show students working and learning at home.
Posts that show the appreciation of parents for the support from teachers for learning at home or that show the appreciation that teachers have for the support from parents in facilitating learning from home activities.
Posts that show the heartwarming connections between teachers and home and that demonstrate a sense of continuity of these connections between our school-home communities.

If you have photos you would like to share, please tweet or post on the division or school social media accounts (be sure to tag either). Or, email me and I will share them through our classroom social media. Let’s celebrate our FMPSD family together!

Second, so many important events have been sidelined by our current circumstances. One that we always look forward to at Christina Gordon is our annual Family Multi-cultural Night and Potluck. If you look at our school calendar, this event was scheduled for tomorrow (Thursday, April 2nd) night. Obviously we can't be together physically to share in this special evening, but we can make the best of this situation by sharing virtually. See the attached poster for information on how you can participate. Let's make this happen and prove that physical isolation doesn't mean that we can't still be together while apart. What a great opportunity to turn this into a "learning at home" experience for your children by having them help you prepare or serve the meal. Or maybe you just take advantage of the time together to share the meal as a family and then virtually with our Christina Gordon family by posting photos on social media or sending them to the school to post for you by replying to this email. Remember, multi-cultural. Wherever we are from represents 'our' culture, so anything that you prepare can be part of your culture, whether you are from Nunavut, Newfoundland, Namibia or New Zealand and all places in between. We have more than 50 countries and all provinces and territories represented at Christina Gordon. Let's see how many cultures we can represent!

Finally, I know that not all of our families are currently using Seesaw. If you are not able to use Seesaw consistently, but would still like to access the daily Read Aloud videos, you are able to do so. I will still be posting the videos each day on our classroom website on the Agenda page. You can also check our classroom's Seesaw Blog which will have the videos and comments from our classroom community. The video for yesterday was "What Does it Mean to Be Kind?" and today's video was "If You Give a Dog a Donut". As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns in regards to any of the above. I am also available to help students and families with technology issues or setting up Seesaw accounts. Just send me an email and we can arrange a time to talk. Thanks everyone,

- Ashley Barrington, Grade 3 Teacher