Preparing Our Elementary Kids Return to School
It has been a year since many children in California and nationally have returned to a traditionally classroom since the COVID 19 pandemic. Many smaller elementary schools and school districts have successfully reopened their schools to students while enforcing clearly defined health and safety procedures.
Safe COVID Practices
Summarized below are best practices these schools use to ensure that their students are safe at school:
- The school continues to share with families what the staff has done to ensure safe learning for students. Classroom teachers and the school’s administrative staff provide regular updates.
- Students sit in socially distanced desks in classrooms.
- They wear masks at school.
- Students bring their own food and socially distance from others when eating lunch and snacks.
- They bring their own hand sanitizer or soap for regular handwashing.
- Many schools test students every two weeks to ensure they do not have COVID 19.
- Most students continue attending school online two to three times a week as part of a hybrid learning model to limit the number of students at a school site each day.
Joyce Iwasaki has over thirty years of educational experience working with diverse students in grades from preschool through high school. Joyce’s extensive background includes teaching elementary school, serving on early childhood advisory boards, and advocating for educational initiatives as a legislative aide. During her tenure as a legislative aide, she helped create legislation that allowed incarcerated mothers to keep their newborn babies with them while in prison. Additional legislation was enacted to allow incarcerated pregnant mothers to remain unshackled during labor and delivery. Ms. Iwasaki established and served as the president of an educational scholarship foundation for fifteen years. Her foundation awarded college scholarships to emerging student leaders who provided service to their schools and communities. Joyce is active in performing arts and cultural organizations. She also provides ongoing support to her daughter and family by raising her grandson in her home.
Friends, Silence Makes Us Complicit
How We Help Our K-12 Children Manage Money
Many parents and students continue to struggle with remote learning. As a substitute teacher/tutor for second grade students using the Google classroom platform, I provide literacy writing units for students and tutor them in reading and writing. I also help students understand how to use their preferred learning styles when tackling difficult subjects. For example, one of our students loves to sing her math solutions. Other students love to calculate math solutions. Still others write and describe the steps to solving math problems as they complete the computations. When teaching students how to write about a topic, we provide students with options on how they can complete their assignments. 
When I tutor students in the Goggle classroom, I listen and watch them carefully as they describe how they prefer to learn when reading and writing. For example, one student may describe how she gains lots of information about a story by looking at the pictures in the story first. Another student may want to write down his answer about what he just read before summarizing the story in two sentences. A third student may prefer drawing pictures or acting out the story before discussing or writing a story.