This is part of Encounter Edu’s additional guidance for using the website during the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak. During this period of uncertainty, school closures and self-isolation, parents and teachers may need to teach differently.

Encounter Edu’s teacher resources are designed along traditional teaching lines. This means that there are a number of lessons that make up a unit. Each unit has a title that tells you the general topic, e.g. Our Ocean Planet or Code Smart. You can also sort the teacher resources by age range, school subject and topic. Individual lessons sit within each of these units. Typically, there are between five and seven lessons in each unit, each representing about one hour of standard classroom teaching. Each lesson page has a general overview and list of lesson steps, a tab listing all the resources that are online or downloadable and list of relevant curriculum links.

Guidance for teachers

If you are a teacher, you probably know how to handle the different resources. The lesson plan and teacher guidance are for you. You can share the student sheets via email or other communications system with students, as well as any multimedia connected to the lesson. For the slideshow, you can either send this to students and go through the slides together. You can also share the slideshow using screen-sharing, a function included in some video calling / conferencing tools such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

Guidance for parents/carers

If you are a parent or carer, you might be home-schooling for the first time. Our teacher resources have been designed for novice teachers, so you are in good hands. To prepare for a lesson, teachers would typically download all the resources and read through the teacher guidance first to see what is involved in teaching the lesson. The next step would be to check to see if there are any background resources in the Professional Development section for teaching or subject knowledge tips.

Then to deliver the lesson, the teacher would show the PowerPoint slideshow on a screen and use the notes in the teacher guidance to work through this. Any use of student sheets is listed in the teacher guidance and these can either be printed out and completed by hand, or you can talk through these on screen. For assessment, get in touch if you would like particular help with how to assess learning, but for exam questions we have mark schemes in place that can guide this.