COVID-19 Resource
Feature of the day – les ressources en français
Bonjour tout le monde!
A conversation that I had with my sister-in-law at the beginning of the month centred around the worry of the french as a first language, french immersion and core french teachers that they would not be able to reach their students in a meaningful way as so much of their students’ learning was from oral sources and constant immersion in the language in the classroom. How do you do that when you’re at home?!
When we were brainstorming about the function of this website, we knew that we really needed to try to support our french teachers. We hope that we have started a repository of french resources that you can use with your students but we certainly will add more if you let us know some tool that is working beautifully for you and we’re missing it.
You’ll find read-aloud books and magazines for K-12 as well as wonderful videos and activities that have been made available to all educators during this emergency remote learning time in the Online Tools under ‘Collected Resources’. In this same tab, you even have complimentary access to Pearson’s Mathology resource for K-3.
If you want your students to do Yoga en français, there’s even a resource tab for Wellness!
All School Board resources are in the tab ‘COVID-19 School Board Resources’. French boards have a program for Apprendre à la maison and now they’re in one place! Lots of boards like CSPNEO and Mon Avenir CSC have daily tasks for K-12 each week. Why reinvent the wheel when we can share instead.
We’re excited to be able to offer this platform for our french educators and will soon have tags to make your navigation to french resources even easier but for now, breathe. That’s our mantra too. Let us know how we can support you further. Rester bien. #OntarioEducatorsUnite
Feature of the Day – Online Tools
As we were pouring through School Board webpages looking for their ‘At Home learning resources’ to link into this website, we made an exciting discovery. Several boards had links to online tools that usually need a school board email address and password but because of the COVID-19 pandemic are open for EVERYONE to have access for free. Parents. Students. Grandparents who want to read to their grandchildren over Zoom. Everyone.
This totally made me think. We need to share these tools in one place – hence the Online Tools in the Collected Resources tab on the website.
Just today, I received an email from MusicPlay, an online resource I have used for many years which is a rich comprehensive program for teaching, singing and learning Music from Pre-K to Grade 6. It just got added into the mix on our site!
We’ve found free resources in french for those teachers worried that their students won’t be able to stay current. There’s books and videos and magazines on Eureka, Connexions Nord, Curio.ca and the French Experiment! We found reading material for the younger folk that parents and kids can read in other languages while they learn English on the Unite for Literacy site. I’m loving the ease that the literacy sites have thought about to get students immediately reading! And let’s not forget sites like Bookflix which if you have never used before, pairs a Non Fiction and Fiction book on hundreds of subjects. I can feel my inner Teacher Librarian just bubbling away with excitement for all of this!
We’ve also added in all the free Math, Science and Social Studies tools we’ve found so far that are made for Ontario educators and students. Pearson, Grolier, and Nelson all have resources for you to tap into to support your students’ learning.
Enough for now. Take a look at the Online Tools but, as always, baby steps. Pick one and explore. They’re not going anywhere while we’re teaching together at home… but have some fun with the ones you do check out! There’s some great learning to be had.
Mary Walker Hope