Day 7 – Hope to Home Learning – Scheduling by Kristen Okabayashi, Principal
Thank you to the many of you who filled out the survey we sent home last Friday. Overall, it seems that most of you are coping reasonably well with the change in learning structure. The most common challenge reported by families was some of you are finding that balance between working from home and keeping your children engaged in online learning as well. This will continue to be a work in progress, particularly those of you with younger children at home, and today’s newsletter includes some suggestions to help:
Schedules – we encourage all our families to come up with some type of schedule, if you haven’t already. This will help your kids get up in the morning and get ready to learn. Depending on the age of the child, you will want to vary learning times with active times so students are not spending too long on assignments or online activities, just like we do at school.
Learning timelines – on Monday, we discussed our learning targets in terms of time spent on assignments on learning. If your child consistently is working longer than these guidelines, please look at their schedule – are they taking brain breaks? Or alternatively, are they taking too many brain breaks and not attending to their learning? If neither of those are true, please share that feedback with your child’s teacher so we are aware of how long your child is spending on an assignment. In general, we feel a younger child ages preschool through second grade should be spending 1-2 hours on learning per day, students in grades 3-5 should spend about 3-4 hours, and middle school students should be spending about 4-5 hours per day.
Access to technology – when we asked families if all their children had access to technology, we asked during a time when we thought school would be closed for 2-3 weeks and parents would still be at work. Since then, households have changed where many parents are working from home with their own technological needs, and the timeframe is now 5-6 weeks at least. If your child needs access to an iPad, please let your child’s teacher know and we can get one ready to loan out to your family.
Partner with teachers – if your child is struggling in any way, please let us know. Whether they can’t access something online, or you are missing a textbook, or you child is struggling with anxiety or something else, please reach out to your child’s teacher. We want to hear from you!
We hope to see families making the adjustment to our new “normal” this week. Looking ahead into next week, we want everyone to take spring break off as a vacation week, including teachers who have been working extremely hard. After that, we will be back at it as we head into the month of April!
Calendar of Events
March 23 – 26: 2nd Week of Hope to Home Learning
March 30 – April 3: Spring Break
Facebook LIVE!
If you are currently on Facebook, please follow the school and church page for the latest updates and news plus a morning announcement to start off the day. If you are not on Facebook you can view the posts on our website homepage in the weekly blog post.
Registration for Fall 2020
If you have not registered for Fall 2020, now is the time to do so. You may register your student(s) through the K12Online Portal using each student’s i.d. and access key (contact the office if you need this information). Tuition contracts will be sent out at the end of April, including financial assistance letters. Please make sure to apply for assistance no later than the end of April.
We realize that this is a tough time financially and emotionally for families. Your family’s well-being and continued involvement in the Hope School community is important to us, so please reach out with any questions or concerns to Admissions Director, Sally Heit at sheit@hopseattle.org.
Financial Aid Information for 2020-21 Academic Year
We partner with School and Student Services (SSS) for our financial aid process each year. Instructions for applying for financial aid at Hope Lutheran School are available by visiting sss.nais.org/parents. Our school’s SSS code is 179833. The Early Decision deadline is March 31st and the final deadline to apply for aid is April 30, 2020.
All church services including Wednesday LENT services have been canceled at this time. Visit our website https://vimeo.com/hopeseattle/videos to watch live video church services.
