Dr. Johnson's Reading Blog

 Before tomorrow's first day of virtual learning, I wanted to send out a couple of reminders and thoughts. School starts at 9:00 am. Each day when students get on their Chromebooks they will click on this link to enter our Google Meet. This link is also found at the top of our Google Classroom page. That link will be used for ALL virtual meetings (synchronous learning). This week (8/31- 9/4) I am ending the day at 1:30 pm, but I will be available after that time to help parents and students navigate all the technology. At CFI we believe in building community and relationships! The next two weeks will focus on this through virtual morning meetings and synchronous teaching. The next two weeks will also focus on helping students gain some independence on their Chromebooks. I will help students organize the different websites they will need to use, organize their classwork, and hopefully develop a way for them to organize their passwords. Hopefully this will help students and parents ...

During virtual learning teacher are expected to take daily attendance. I wanted to highlight how attendance would work. A student is considered "Present" if he/she: participates in synchronous leaning OR completes and submits the Daily Participation Assignment (DPA). For our classroom, the DPA will be a Google Form Exit Slip that students will fill out at the end of the day. Each day's Google Form Exit Slip will be located on our Google Classroom . Students will fill out the exit slip and submit it for each day. A student is considered "Absent" if he/she DOES NOT: participate in synchronous class lessons OR complete and submit the DPA (Google Form Exit Slip) 🙏Virtual learning is complex and personal for each family. There might be particular days in which students are unable to meet for live meetings; there might be particular hours of the day when virtual learning just might not feasible for whatever reasons. There might be days when we just need to take a na...

During virtual learning, communication between myself, parents, and students will be more important than ever. Being at CFI we are all so used to simply "popping in" the school when we have questions. Virtual learning will make this difficult unfortunately! Parents: Feel free to email ( scjohnson@richland2.org ) any time throughout the school day, but know I may not be able to immediately respond. I should be able to respond when I'm not engaged in synchronous learning or working with small group and individual students. Most emails will be responded to during my office hours between 3:00 - 4:00. (Honestly, I'm usually pretty good about responding quickly since I hate having my inbox full.) If you send any email after 4:00 pm, I will try to respond when possible. Last year I didn't allow myself a clear deadline for responding to emails or text messages so I felt like I was constantly available. If you need to call (803-699-2969) into the classroom to contact me, p...

 I know that we have a few weeks before we officially start the virtual school year, but I want to start reaching out to everyone. So . . . WELCOME TO THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR! I am excited to be working alongside you and your child for the next two years. Instead of sending out long emails with lots of information, I thought I would start sending short, succinct emails that would provide information you might need to start the year (I will also copy these emails and post them to my classroom blog so you can refer to them if needed). Little by little I'll be contacting you with information on virtual learning, goals for the year, the different ways I will push information to you, etc.