At American International School, our key mindset is confidence. Naturally, as we prepared our community to transition to Online School, growing our students’ confidence remained at the forefront of our planning. AIS educators are highly experienced and well prepared to facilitate online learning, given our recent experience. Our talented faculty and strong academic programs help us to design interactive learning opportunities, where students can interact, collaborate, communicate, and cooperate with other students, as a way of keeping online learning engaging, inspiring, and fun.
In addition to prioritizing interactive learning experiences, all students are provided with age and stage appropriate opportunities for independent learning and practice that students are expected to complete alone. Students are also given opportunities to develop socially and emotionally through Zoom support sessions with our Elementary School Counselor, online recess with their Homeroom Teacher, virtual play dates with friends of their choice, and through the use of frequent brain breaks to refresh thinking.
Online School at AIS includes a wide variety of interactive online lessons in music, visual art, physical education, science, social studies, language arts, mathematics, Mandarin and more! Students from EC1-Grade 1 access Seesaw as their Learning Management Systems (LMS). Google Classroom is used by students in Grade 2-4 and Hapara in Grades 5-6.
Importantly, our students’ holistic learning continues with opportunities for social emotional learning (SEL) These learning experiences ensure that our students continue to work on developing our Expected Schoolwide Learning Results (ESLRs) of becoming Global Citizens, Empowered Thinkers, Effective Communicators and Well-Rounded Individuals.
Parents and students from EC1-Grade 6 were invited to participate in online orientation sessions before resuming full time Online School to ensure that everyone was prepared, ready, and confident about how and where to access resources. These welcome sessions also allowed participants to practice using relevant tools and technologies and to re-establish online learning norms and protocols.
After Lunar New Year or whenever it is possible for students to return to campus, we have plans in place to reacquaint our students with face-to-face learning expectations and routines. Once again, our key mindset of confidence will continue to drive our academic and social-emotional learning programs as our students work towards our ESLRs and to coming to school every day. We can’t wait for that!
