At GEMS World Academy Chicago, we are fortunate to have innovation as a core pillar of our program. We have many tools in place that students are used to that support remote learning, and our community mindset is one of growth and enthusiastically embracing the challenges that come our way. Additionally, the learner profile for a student in an International Baccalaureate program, or, the attributes we instill and reinforce in our students, lead to students who understand the active role they play in their learning. Even at a young age, our students know to strive to be self-directed, actively engaged inquirers. 

Nevertheless, taking an entire program online for young learners is no easy task. The Lower School program at GEMS World Academy Chicago (preschool-grade 5) has adapted to remote learning by providing a combination of whole class, small group and one on one live classes depending on the grade level and developmental appropriateness. All students have at least one daily live lesson four days a week. We have designated one day of the week as screen free or screen light in the upper elementary grades. Teachers post weekly schedules of live classes and daily assignments, video mini lessons or learning activities.  Many assignments are optional providing choices for families seeking more or less learning activities.

The Early Childhood Challenge

As early childhood educators we are cognizant of the challenges of engaging young learners and the importance of minimizing screen time.  GEMS has created a bank of parent resources to support authentic learning and inquiry based play at home.  We have taken our popular  Parent University series online to specifically support parents of young students with remote learning and each teacher hosts weekly office hours online to answer questions and connect parents within our community to one another.

One of the key factors in our success has been the choice to continue to use learning platforms with which our young students and their families were already familiar.  Our primary source for communicating assignments and learning activities is Seesaw for preschool through grade 3 students.  Students in Grades 4 and 5 are also using Google classroom since they have email addresses and personal laptops.  We are also incorporating a variety of engaging online tools and applications, some of which our students are familiar with, while others are new to GEMS students.d.  A few examples are:

• Flipgrid          

• Brainingcamp

• Garageband  

• Scratch

• IXL

• Khan Academy

• Newsela

• Notability

Maintaining Consistency

We continue to engage in online Field Study experiences to support unit of inquiry work. These experiences  enable our students to observe experiments, listen to presentations and ask pertinent questions. 

World Language, Art, Music,  Physical Education, STEAM and Library classes are taught via a combination of live instruction as well as video lessons and activity posts. To better support at home reading and learning, GEMS maintains subscriptions to multiple online libraries such as Destiny Follett, Pebblego, Epic  and RAZ kids. 

The Importance of Feedback

We are fortunate at GEMS to have a faculty population of innovators, many of whom have experience with remote learning, all of whom are willing to rise to the challenge of our new normal. However, distance learning places all of us in an unprecedented situation and now more than ever our cohesiveness as a community matters in creating an exceptional learning environment for our students. We value our parent community and critical to our success with distance learning has been seeking regular feedback via surveys on how we are doing. Each week we have made minor adjustments to better serve our students.  As a community of  learners, the teachers are committed to reflecting and modifying their practices; and while many feel the stress of adapting to remote learning there is also an appreciable sense of invigoration in our community, derived from new learning ourselves.