EBGIS Remote Learning Program

For our youngest students, our Remote Learning Program follows the same approach as our on-campus program. The daily schedule includes a morning welcome, music and storytime, arts and crafts projects, movement, and other developmentally appropriate learning activities adapted to an online format. Each day’s schedule and activities are presented in the Early Childhood Daily, an email newsletter linked to the Teams platform and online resources.

Throughout the school day, our Early Childhood Program faculty conduct live, 30-minute teaching sessions on the Microsoft Teams platform. Families may elect to join for all or part of the programming according to their individual child’s needs and interests. All sessions are recorded and made available for our families to view at a later time. In addition, families may arrange for one-on-one video meetings with their child’s teacher.

Early Childhood Program: Daily Live Teaching Sessions

Materials for arts and crafts activities are available for pickup on campus, where social distancing standards are maintained. Families often share delightful photos of their children’s artwork and learning adventures.

In addition, our kindergarteners’ daily schedule includes School Ready! -- our school-readiness program focused on phonological awareness, prewriting exercises and bilingual listening comprehension and language development. Through School Ready! our kindergarteners develop skills enabling them to transition smoothly to the first grade and excel academically.

In this way, we continue to implement our Early Childhood curriculum through a variety of activities and interactions mirroring as closely as possible what our students would ordinarily experience in the classroom.

Our Elementary School students follow a daily schedule starting at 8:30am and ending at 2pm, just as they did on campus. Every day starts with a live 30-minute homeroom class session. In addition, each elementary school class receives an additional nine periods of weekly live instruction in German, Math, English, Art, P.E. and Natur und Gesellschaft (Nature and Society). During these teacher-led online classes, students receive live instruction, discuss topics, work on assigned tasks, and ask questions as they would in a traditional classroom setting. Additionally, students have regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings with their homeroom teachers as well as student-initiated “drop in” meetings. At the end of each day, there is again a 30-minute homeroom meeting to review the day and discuss students’ work.

While on campus, students received a Weekly Plan (Wochenplan) with learning tasks in each school subject. Students worked on their Weekly Plans at designated times, developing their time management and independent learning skills. In our Remote Learning Program, students continue developing those skills using Daily Plans (Tagesplӓne) that they receive every morning. The Daily Plans also allow families to see at a glance what their children are learning. Of course, students receive all the support they need to complete their Daily Plans in homeroom sessions, subject classes, and scheduled and impromptu meetings with teachers.

Schedules:

• Grade 1
• Grade 2
• Grade 3
• Grade 4

Our Middle Schoolers’ daily schedule has not changed in the move from on-campus to remote learning. Every class period begins with live video instruction from a specialist teacher. Just as in the classroom, teachers introduce and explain topics and assign tasks including group work. Students then often adjourn to smaller groups for collaborative work and submit their finished product via the Teams platform. Questions can be addressed to teachers via video call or email. Quizzes and exams are administered as they would be in class. Teachers provide feedback to students during class sessions and in one-on-one meetings.

We are delighted at how quickly all of our students have adapted to the new online format. Our Early Childhood families have dived into their new partnership with our teaching faculty and shared photos and videos of their activities and creations. Our grades students appear on time when classes start and participate actively in class discussions. They work diligently on individual and collaborative assignments and promptly upload their finished products. Within our school community we have supported, inspired and energized one another to continue the important work of learning.

Middle school students have already set up their profiles in Teams. All other students have been assigned EBGIS Microsoft Office accounts. Parents can help their children log on and sign into Teams as follows:

STEP 1: Log into Microsoft Office 365 at portal.office.com.

STEP 2: Enter your child’s EBGIS email address.

STEP 3: Enter the initial password that was emailed to you. You may be prompted to change your child’s password and you can always change it under “settings” on the Office 365 Dashboard.

When Office 365 opens, it will provide more information and access to several Office applications. Open the Teams application.

We recommend downloading the “Teams” desktop app to your computer. When you open the browser-based Teams app you will find a download link in the lower left corner.

The mobile version also works well (except with the Safari browser), but for video conferencing the desktop app is a better choice.

If you have any technical issues, please reach out to support@ebgis.org and we will be happy to help.

Welcome to our online learning platform! More information will follow.