September 7th News

Hello Brave Virtual Academy Families,

Our Focus

At Indian Hill’s Brave Virtual Academy, we are focusing our work toward three big ideas:

Building Community

• How can we ensure every learner feels connected to teachers, peers, home school, and community?

• How can we create a culture where all stakeholders contribute to our goals?

Personalized Learning

• How can we ensure every learner can access the curriculum, is learning at the appropriate pace and level of challenge, and is actively working towards meeting his or her goals?

Student Agency

• How can we move learners from passive to active participants in their learning?

Through our BVA Community Town Hall Meetings and future newsletters, we will be sharing ways of how you can support these goals with your children at home.

Parent Information Night

Thank you to those of you who attended our Live Virtual Elementary School Parent Information Night. I am hoping that you now have a clearer idea of what we are doing to make sure your child has a great school year in Brave Virtual Academy.

Our Primary School will be hosting their Parent Information night on Thursday, September 10th.

• Kindergarten sessions will take place from 5:45 pm - 6:15 pm;

• First Grade sessions will be from 6:15 pm - 6:45 pm;

• Second Grade sessions will be from 6:45 pm - 7:15 pm.

Your child's teacher will be sending you the links you need to log into your child’s teacher’s session.

Meet the Teacher

The Middle School will be hosting their Meet the Teacher Live Virtual Event on Tuesday, September 8th. We are taking advantage of our online space and doing something a little different for you! The teachers and I will be hosting a Community Town Hall session beginning at 7:00 pm to give an overview of our philosophy and plan for our IHMS Brave Virtual Academy. Each teacher will then be sharing the big ideas of each curricular area across grades 6-8. Mrs. Ulland will be sending out the links to all sessions Tuesday.

The High School will be hosting their Meet the Teacher Live Virtual Event on Thursday, September 10th. We are encouraging students and parents to follow their child’s schedule for the evening and attend the live sessions for each IH teacher’s parallel course. We believe that building the connection between you, your child, and our IH teachers are important to foster to strengthen and support learning with the online coursework. Liaisons will be emailing you and your child a copy of your child’s schedule by Wednesday afternoon and Mr. Damadeo will be sending out how to access the links to live sessions.

BVA Community Town Hall Meetings

On Tuesday, September 15th, from 7 - 8 pm, we will host the first of our BVA Community Town Hall meetings. We will start with a K-12 audience and then have sessions that are specific to school. Our format will be a 10-15 minute introductory presentation on a topic relevant to learning in a virtual environment and then follow up with discussion and questions in an open dialogue. As these meetings develop, we’ll invite guest speakers to talk about issues specific to age/grade level learners as well as more general topics such as mental health, fostering curiosity, promoting a growth mindset, and more. Our first session will be about strategies to help learners to appropriately pace their asynchronous work. I hope to see you there! Stay tuned for the link. These sessions will be recorded and posted for families unable to join us for the live event.

Feedback Survey Results

In last week’s newsletter, I published a link for a general survey about Brave Virtual Academy connections. Thank you so much to those of you who gave feedback, it was very helpful and we are using your comments to build stronger consistency & clarity in online learning spaces for parents and learners and exploring more ways to build relationships between learners. Know that in any school year, but especially in a virtual environment, building routines and relationships needs to happen before we can assess learners’ current levels of skill and provide the right challenge of instruction for them. You should begin to see more academic assignments coming this week. Please feel free to schedule a meeting with me if you would like to share your ideas or what would make our Brave Virtual Academy better for your child.

Attendance

Students in virtual learning programs are still responsible for attending school. In BVA, attendance might look a little different from face to face school. Here is our current plan for tracking attendance for our learners:

• Parents should call your school’s attendance line if your child is sick or will miss school for the day.

  • PS - 513-272-4757

  • ES - 513-272-4707

  • MS - 513-272-4700

  • HS - 513-272-4705

• Parents should also notify their child’s teacher/liaison if they will not be online during live meetings.

• Teachers and liaisons will report attendance to the office after the first live session of the day. In subsequent live sessions each day, teachers will make note of attendance and follow up with families exhibiting a pattern of truancy.

• Technical difficulties will be taken into account when documenting attendance. Patterns of missed live sessions will need to be reported. Our Indian Hill BVA teachers and liaisons will work with families to ensure we can support learners logging in to live sessions successfully.

Pacing of Student Work

I mentioned that we are going to discuss how you can help your child to pace his or her asynchronous assignments (work completed outside of live online teacher sessions) in our first BVA Community Town Hall meeting scheduled for the 15th. Here are some tips for you to try between now and then:

Students benefit from:

• A set place to do their school work, as free from distraction as possible.

• Setting clear goals - have your child set reasonable goals for how they will stretch themselves in school and in life this year. These goals should be focused on learning/mastering new skills vs. earning specific grades or working for a certain number of minutes.

• Regular routines to complete work along with scheduled breaks, time away from the screen, and time outside. Depending on your child’s readiness, create a weekly agenda with your child or ask your child to create a first draft of their weekly agenda, being sure to schedule in open time as well as time for school assignments.

• Working their plan - Check in with your child to see how the agenda is working for him or her. Adjust as necessary.

What Our Faculty are Working On:

This week, our teachers and liaisons are continuing our work of examining the ways we are building community, personalizing each student’s learning experience and developing skills to help students act as partners in their own learning. In Kindergarten, this might be teaching students how to greet one another on Zoom, in high school, this might be helping students to develop their own daily agenda for how to approach their online course load. In grades K-8, students will be building skills and content knowledge and in High School, students will be finding a workable plan to make progress in their online courses.

I look forward to our work with your children this week, our upcoming parent nights, and our Brave Virtual Academy Town Hall meeting on September 15th.

Have an amazing week!