Good Afternoon Yealey Families,
Welcome back to the 2020 school year. This week you made history at Yealey Elementary -our first virtual start in 57 years! I think overall it was a great start. Thank you to everyone who sent in pictures so we could "see" the kids throughout the week. I love getting these posts and look forward to them each day. Remember to follow us on all our social media feeds - see the links on the side of this page. I want to get back to our normal modes of communication by updating the blog weekly. While this might not be our first choice of how we attend school, this is our normal. And I think it's best that we return to some normal organization. So, unless there is an emergency or time critical information that needs to be sent, I will go back to our weekly blog updated every Friday.
I wanted to give you some additional information about some of the tools and structures we are using. First, Chromebooks were distributed to all families 1st - 5th who needed or wanted to use a school device. We will be working over the next couple of weeks to hopefully get devices to all students as quickly as we can while also making a plan to repair the 12 Chromebooks that are having issues. If you have any questions about these please don't hesitate to reach out to Mr. Dunlap or Ms Wilson our school technology coordinators.
The district has recommended work time guidelines for virtual instruction of 2 hours online and 4 hours maximum. I just wanted to be sure you were aware where these are coming from. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a 2 hour maximum of online instruction. So, teachers are making assignments using online programs and meets to reach this maximum. Then, they are assigning additional classwork that can be completed off of the computer for a maximum of 2 more hours. This total of 4 hours comes from the amount of time students average of brain engaged class time when they are at school. Once you remove transitions, recess, lunch, and other interruptions that occur naturally during in person instruction the amount of time students are engaged in learning averages about 4 hours per day.
We are very excited that we are able to provide online instruction using the iReady program. Next week you will start to see that students are asked to login to iReady and take diagnostics. These diagnostics are designed to set your child up for instructional paths within the program. So, please be sure to encourage them to do their best and don't provide too much help or instructions to them when taking the diagnostics. Your homeroom teachers will be giving you more information on this. We have a two week window to complete these diagnostics starting Monday. Once the learning path is established, the teachers will be able to organize small groups, add additional assignments, and work individually with students on their progress and learning goals. This is a new tool for our school that we specifically sought out this summer to help with virtual instruction. We are excited to see the progress our students will make with this tool.
Thanks for the feedback we received on our special area classes this week. We have used that information to tweak the plan for specials for the month of September (or until we move to Yellow status). Please look for directions next week from your homeroom teacher on how to access specials on Wednesdays – we are working on a process that will reduce the number of students in a meet and allow for a little more time with each special. All other days of the week, please visit the special area classrooms that you received access to already. There are great activities loaded into these classrooms for you to do whenever you want to complete them throughout the week. Our special area classes are designed to give students a broad exposure to PE, Music, Art, Computers, and Spanish. We want to give students a general knowledge so that they develop a lifelong appreciation of these subject areas. We also hope that we will provide students enough exposure so that they can make good choices in middle and high school once these subjects become electives. We will not be changing our grading policies or procedures for these subject areas due to virtual instruction. Wednesdays will be a required meet time so please join live or view the videoed session– this takes the place of us “taking” them to specials everyday like we do when students are in person. The other days we encourage utilizing the google classrooms to gain the most and best experience from our virtual specials.
Your homeroom teachers should have provided you with their communication methods. Remind is the most widely used tool at Yealey but we do have some classrooms using different tools such as Bloomz, Dojo, and ClassTag. Please be sure you have gotten the information from your homeroom teachers on how to receive these updates.
I hope you all enjoy your weekend. Stay healthy and positive!
Mrs. Turner
principal
