Good morning to all!

What an exciting, nerve-wracking, emotion-filled time. We are doing our best to offer a new school “normal” at a time when the world is anything but normal.

To start off, give yourself permission to do your best and recognize that doing your best may not be what you hope or expect or want right now. Allow yourself to feel excited, nervous, flexible, unsure, and confused. We are learning and we are all in this together.

The Special Education department is paying close attention to everybody’s needs and we are here to support you through this challenging time.

Here are a few quick tips that may help you along:

1. Set up a consistent routine (as best you can) for the week.
2. Make a visual schedule of what that routine will look like for your family. (I’ll try and insert some examples below of what that could look like)
3. Encourage your child to stay connected to their teacher. After each live session – make sure your child knows they can still connect to their teacher by email, or google hangout. Encourage as much independence as possible.
4. Adhere to breaks, exercise and lots of fun, giggles and laughter!
5. You can substitute tasks to make things work for you and your family. We are all allowing for flexibility and creativity, just communicate with your child’s teacher
6. Document your child’s learning when possible and send it in. Everything counts as learning. Cooking, building, art, board games, card games, learning a new magic trick, going on a virtual field trip, going for a run outside, writing a song, playing an instrument, doing a science experiment.
7. Reduce your own pressure and allow everyone to do their best – these are stressful times.
8. Use and encourage your child to use the supports that they need to be successful.  They are allowed and encouraged to have their work scribed if they need that, to use voice to text software, to use google read and write, to use graphic organizers, to have text to speech software read them the material.
9. Ask for help when you need it.
10. Celebrate your child’s success all along the way!

Reach out if you need support. s.reichstein@theojcs.ca or send me a google hangout!

It doesn’t have to be fancy – it can be drawn out on paper or a whiteboard – just something to help kids follow along.

This one includes incentives to work toward a prize or a break… nice way to motivate and some students love earning stars or stickers.

I like this idea as well because it shows what still needs to be complete. This might be a different checklist to create. Not the schedule per se, but a task completion checklist!

I’ll keep posting and sharing! Stay healthy, stay happy, stay calm.