Parents give weekly lesson plans the thumbs up
12 June 2020
The Western Cape Education Department has been providing weekly lessons plans to assist teachers, parents and learners with learning from home during lockdown.
The initiative is intended to help learners keep up with the curriculum from their own home, and proved invaluable for parents like Marietjie Theron whose sons are in Grade 4 and Grade 6. Theron said it was a challenge to help the two boys with their school work since lockdown started but it all changed when the school made them aware of the lesson plans that were uploaded to the WCED website.
“I could use the videos and learning material from the school, and in conjunction with the lesson plans, I knew what was expected as an outcome of the week's homework. This gave me guidance and a lot more confidence to help the boys with their homework.”
Theron added that she looked forward to new lesson plans uploaded each week. “I enjoyed the breakdown of skills/ methodologies and especially resources. And don’t underestimate the value of the memorandum! Specifically in Maths. I am not always 100% sold on the 'new' way of multiplication, but could help them with all the questions, in the same way as what the teacher would have explained it. That helped a lot in easing the transition to home schooling.”
Ilse Fredericks, the parent of a Grade 1 learner, said she appreciated the fact that the WCED resources were interactive and the presenters enthusiastic. “I really like the teachers in the videos.”
The lesson plans are developed in collaboration between the senior curriculum planners based at head office with the assistance of the subject advisers based at the district offices as well as a few teachers.
The eLearning advisers assist with the uploading of lesson resources to the ePortal as well as the designing of interactive lesson posters to be distributed via WhatsApp.
All these resources (lesson resources, lesson plans, and interactive posters) are published weekly to the ePortal and are collated in one central point for easy access.
More than 400 free educational resources are uploaded to the ePortal per week to support quality learning at home.
The lesson plans can be found on the School Closure Pack (soon to be renamed to Back to School) of the ePortal:
• Foundation Phase Weekly Lesson plans https://wcedeportal.co.za/partners/#103451
• Intermediate Phase Weekly Lesson plans https://wcedeportal.co.za/partners/#103466
• Senior Phase Weekly Lesson plans https://wcedeportal.co.za/partners/#103471
• FET Weekly Lesson plans https://wcedeportal.co.za/partners/#103456
Parents are reminded of the recently launched Parent toolkit (https://wcedeteacher.wixsite.com/parenttoolkit), a digital learning toolkit for parents to help facilitate learning at home. It is aimed at giving parents an overview of the various educational platforms, that will support in the creation of a conducive learning environment at home, developing at-home digital learning skills, empowering communications between parents and teachers and guiding parents on ensuring family cyber wellness.
The lesson plans for term 2 have ended, in line with the original school calendar. However, the Term 2 revision pack will be released today. Term 3 will commence in July, as per the original calendar.