River Ranch
Distance Learning
4/17/2020
Dear River Ranch Families,
I hope you all had a wonderful Easter filled with family time and the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection. God could not be giving us better weather to weather this virus storm. I am so grateful!
As you all saw in Mr. Plunk’s email, our campuses will be closed for the remainder of the school year. This is not what any of us wanted, yet here we are. Our job now is helping our students adjust, remembering they take the lead from us. Naming and talking about emotions is a great way to help them process. Creating new deep belly breathing techniques signals the nervous system to calm, reducing stress and anxiety.
River Ranch plans:
Ascension is developing a frequently asked questions page on our website. The page will be organized by topic, so you can read all of it or only read the topics that are relevant to your family. This page will go live next week and will be updated as new information becomes available. It will be accessible from our school website, and I encourage you to re-visit that page and our school calendar regularly.
We are creating a surprise May Day celebration for our Kindergarteners that will look a bit different. Traditionally, we have a May Day Prince and Princess (a Kindergarten Auction item) who lead the procession to the Maypole. Our Prince this year is Jean Luc Soileau and our Princess is Sophia Armentor. Our Kindergarten students have the honor every year of doing the Maypole dance and wrapping our Maypoles in the beautiful ribbons. Stay tuned for the surprise!
Our Communications Team is putting together a virtual tour of First grade for our Kindergarten students. This will take the place of their Spring visit to the Downtown Campus and hopefully will still allow them to experience the excitement of going to the “big campus.”
We are changing the date of our RR Parent-Teacher Conferences to Friday, May 15th. They will either be a phone conference or a Zoom meeting. Your child’s teacher will be in contact about the specifics and scheduling your time slot. Please remember that because of our distance learning situation, the end of year report cards will consist of a narrative providing growth of the student from the beginning of the year to mid-March, recommendations for promotion, and any areas that should be focused on during the summer.
We are also mindful that closure is important for our students, faculty, and parents. We are working to find the best way to offer our school community closure and keep the health and safety of our families in mind. If this is possible, details will be shared as they become available.
Our RR Distance Learning website is updated daily with teacher content, including enrichments, Chapel on Wednesdays, pictures of students learning, and resources. Please continue to access it often. We LOVE hearing from you and seeing our students. You may send pictures, questions, feedback, etc. to your child’s teacher or me. Thank you for ALL you are doing!
4/3/2020
Dear River Ranch Parents,
You have been amazing through this unforeseen time. We appreciate your flexibility, support, and partnership. The Resurrection story, as well as the story in John 11 about Jesus’ good friend Lazarus, teaches us about waiting for God’s greater good. Waiting for the greater good can be a difficult place to be and remain. It reminds me of our current situation. I am so grateful our school is built on the foundation of faith. God’s greater good is to come.
I pray as you celebrate Holy Week and our Easter break next week that it is filled with patient and peaceful waiting. I also pray our faith is strengthened as we await and celebrate God’s goodness.
Our campus has put together an Easter surprise for our students! While looking for the eggs in each picture, we hope it brings you and your child joy and laughter. The link is below, and it will also be on the homepage of our RR Distance Learning Website.
Happy Easter and God bless you and your families,
Julie Bourque
Director, River Ranch Campus
4/1/2020
Dear River Ranch Parents,
As distance learning will now be extended through May 1st, I want to communicate our next steps. In looking forward, we are thinking about assessments, promotions to the next grade level, as well as how we maintain distance learning for at least another three weeks. This is a wonderful article on Home Learning from Conscious Discipline, the Social-Emotional curriculum we practice, "Five Tips for Successful Home Learning". I have also added in some additional resources under the Home tab, General Resources, of our RR Distance Learning website to support you as you partner with us on this journey.
After discussions with Administration, faculty, staff, and your feedback, we have landed on the following:
Distance learning will continue as it has with daily emails containing lessons, activities, and ideas for maintaining and learning concepts. We are conscious of screen time recommendations for our age children and are trying to balance this with the new platform of virtual learning. Play and reading to and with children at this age are so important to their education. Adding these into your day as much as possible to balance screen time is a wonderful way to support your child’s growth.
Moving forward, you may be asked to send pictures or videos of your child’s work to their teachers in order for the teacher to give feedback and make learning suggestions.
We are attempting to find the safest and easiest way to have live interactions with our young students. Stay tuned after the break for more information.
One to one assessments and face to face contact is needed to reliably make growth assessments for this age level. Therefore, “grading” third-trimester skills is not possible as we have not had the opportunity to be together physically. The end of year report cards will consist of a narrative providing growth of the student from the beginning of the year to mid-March, recommendations for promotion, and any areas that should be focused on during the summer.
Again, I can not be more proud of our faculty, staff, administrative team, and parents for ALL that has been done to support our students. They are our foremost concern. We are all getting through this, and we will come out the other side stronger, more courageous, and appreciative of all the things we have missed.
Julie Bourque
Director, River Ranch Campus
3/27/2020
Dear River Ranch Parents,
We have completed our first full week of distance learning. Pat yourselves on the back. EVERYONE involved has done a remarkable job! Thank you for everything you are doing to partner with us. Make sure you access the website to see some precious pictures of what our Distance Learning is looking like.
I have enjoyed all the pictures you are sending as well as the kind, appreciative and supportive words. We are all holding each other up and I am so grateful. I had no doubts because that is what Ascension does so well.
Attached are pictures of our school garden. Farmer Muggivan (Mrs. Muggivan) has been maintaining our garden while we have been gone. We have lettuce, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts. We will sample them and the strawberries when we get back to school.
You and your students remain in our prayers as we navigate through this. Have a wonderful weekend and please contact me with any concerns, overwhelms and of course the good feels as well.
Julie Bourque
Director, River Ranch Campus
3/23/2020
Dear River Ranch Parents,
We are in full on Distance Learning and everyone is rocking it! Our faculty and staff have been hard at work planning distance learning for your children. As we are planning, our goal is to balance what is important for your children to learn in the next few weeks with the many scenarios that you as parents are facing. It is a time to offer grace upon grace to everyone.
I want to give you some information on what distance learning from River Ranch looks like:
An email from your child’s teacher will be sent daily with specific information about learning for the day.
Our RR office will be closed until further notice. Phone messages will be checked on a regular basis.
Email will be used as our online connection tool for River Ranch.
This RR Google Site can be referenced for frequently used content and our weekly Chapel. It will be updated frequently with teacher content, resources and pictures of our students.
Please reach out with ANY questions or concerns. We are all in this together and want to be as helpful as we can be to ease this process.
I am so proud of you parents and this Ascension team for the resiliency and flexibility everyone is showing as we come together (virtually) to move forward in this 4th quarter of school.
Julie Bourque
Director, River Ranch Campus