April 17, 2020
Dear Wonderful MMA Lower El Families,
As always, we hope this letter finds you and your families healthy, happy, and well. As teachers, we have been thinking about you all, especially your children and how we can best help you as we continue to move forward with distance learning.
As a reminder, our lower el blog is still up and running. This is where you can find all the links for any digital components we are using and it is being updated as needed. One new thing we will be adding soon is a page with links for virtual field trips. Since we are all doing our best to practice the stay home and stay safe initiative, we are unable to visit educational places like we normally would on field trips. This page will allow you and your child to virtually explore not only places we could easily attend in person but places that are far away like the San Diego Zoo. Your teacher may also plan a virtual field trip to do as a class. If needed, the link for the blog is http://blogs.mariamontessoriacademy.org/lowerel/.
Moving into the last two weeks of April, we will continue using hard copy packets and the online resources from the blog to help students in their continual progress for learning. At the beginning of April, all lower elementary teachers made packets that had enough material to last through the month for all parents who requested hard copies. If you have already made it to the school to pick up the packet, you have the materials you need for the next two weeks. If you have not picked it up but you requested one, you can pick it up during the next two weeks, Monday to Friday from 9-11 am or 3-5 pm.
If you are feeling overwhelmed with the works and aren’t sure what to do, please refer to the workcharts that were included in the packet and also posted on the blog. These give you suggestions for how many times a week to do certain works and how long to do each one. As a team we wanted to provide you with this to help with some guidance but also still allow students to have a choice like they do at school.
The workcharts are also how we will be tracking work that your child is doing. There are two ways you can turn this in, either dropping it off at the school in your teacher’s bin or by taking a picture and sending it to your teacher. If neither of these options works for you, please send your teacher an email with the works your child has been doing. For example, “John has been doing Imagine Learning Math and Language daily and a page of handwriting 3 times a week.” We ask that you do this every two weeks. We are currently at the end of our second week, so please turn in a workchart or email your teacher as soon as you are able.
As many of you know, we will be in a soft closure through the remainder of the school year. This means we will continue with our distance learning through the last day of school. In order for us as teachers to best meet your student’s learning needs, we have created a survey that will be shared with you by your child’s teacher no later than this coming Monday. It is a short survey that will take only a few minutes and give us data to help us moving forward. Please complete this survey by this coming Wednesday end of day.
As teachers we will be updating our blogs weekly, contacting you via phone call, email, or Remind bi-weekly, and doing a class meeting (most likely through Zoom) weekly. This way we hope to support you and your child individually in the best way possible.
We will have a solid plan on what the final three weeks of school will look like regarding works and end of year traditions like bridging by the first part of May.
Thank you all for your hard work in helping your children continue their learning and educational growth during this time of social distancing. We miss your children greatly and hope to see them all during one of the class meetings we will be having. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email your child’s teacher.
Stay healthy, happy, and safe.
Take care,
Lower Elementary Team