Pontiac Times

Avondale School District issued the following announcement.

I hope that you are all doing well and that your students, like all of us, are excited to get back to a pattern of teaching and learning.  Avondale School District administrators have been planning for the extended school closure due to the Coronavirus Global Pandemic and have created a Continuity of Learning plan for our students.  Continuity of learning is important in order to avoid the loss of learning that can occur when students are away from the school setting. Avondale educators are committed to working to prevent this loss and to help students grow academically and social/emotionally.

As many of us are working from home and attempting to teach our own children, we are quite aware of the challenges in our new work-school environments. However, we also know how important it is for our students to remain engaged in their learning and expect students to participate in the learning activities each week. 

Beginning on April 20, 2020, instruction will be delivered through online classrooms. Learning activities will be designed by instructional staff during the week of April 13-April 17, 2020. The content will focus on core subjects, social emotional learning, and specials/elective courses. All middle and high school students will receive learning activities aligned to coursework. As teachers work on establishing classrooms for April 20th, they will begin to reconnect with students and their families as early as Wednesday, April 15th and Thursday, April 16th, in order to check connections and touch base with families. This will help ensure a more successful launch in learning on April 20th.

Classroom teachers will post weekly learning activities to their online classroom each Friday by 3pm.  This information will be shared on schools and district websites as well. Students will not be required to be online at any specific time. Students will have no scheduled time for instruction and will have the flexibility to work at their own pace throughout the week. However, teachers and support staff will have scheduled office hours in order to answer student and family questions and continue to keep connected throughout this closure. During office hours, instructional staff may choose to host a virtual face-to-face session in order to stay connected to students.

Learning activities will consider the following:

·      Big Ideas, which are the enduring concepts of a content;

·      Developmentally appropriate tasks or projects; and 

·      Providing feedback to students in a variety of ways such as through online classrooms, email, chats, phone calls, and/or virtual meetings.

For those families who have stated a need to borrow a device for their student to use to participate in online learning, building principals will be contacting you throughout next week. Principals will notify you through email and by phone calls when and where you will have the opportunity to sign-out an Avondale device.  For families who have stated they have a need for access to the internet please click on this link Internet Access & Connectivity Resources.

Like every school in the State of Michigan, our method of teaching has drastically changed. There are, however, constants that will never change for us as we move forward. Avondale School District staff, as always, is dedicated to the academic, emotional and physical growth of our students. We will continue to build relationships with students and their families because we recognize how those relationships contribute to a student’s success. And, mostly, we will always believe in our students’ capacity to overcome and thrive in challenging situations.

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Original source can be found here.