Anonymous wrote:I have absolutely no interest in doing DL with my 4 year old. We tried joining some of the meetings last spring, and she got nothing out of it. I don't want to avoid doing something like taking her on a hike or building a fort or reading books to try and get her to sit in front of the computer screen. If she were in a regular school I'd happily unenroll her, but she's in a charter we really like. Can they kick her out if she doesn't participate in distance learning? Should I just ask them explicitly, "What is the bare minimum to remain enrolled?"
It can't hurt to ask explicitly, though my experience is that sometimes they are a little bit hard to pin down on this issue, I think because they are specifically concerned about the implications of lottery seats and PK participation. For every parent in your position, there is a parent (or 100) who want your seat at the charter and will scream bloody murder if they hear that people who got those seats are not participating in DL.
Just figure out what you need to do to be marked "present" every day, whether it's logging into Canvas or what, and do that. For PK, they are only scheduling like 30 minutes a day of programming, so it can't be that much.
I know my PK3 child is not going to want to sit down for the daily DL lessons, so I'm not going to try particularly hard for those. Like you, I'd rather just take her outside or read books or break out her art supplies. But it sounds like there will be some specials programming (music, yoga) that I could see her liking, as well as read-alongs (she has liked the public library story times we've watched). And our school has one parent-teacher meeting each week as a check-in to see how DL is going, and I am actually looking forward to these because I think it's a good opportunity to get to know the staff and to ask questions about ECE development or behavior that they might have insight/ideas for. I don't anticipate we'll be spending more than 5 hours a week on DL, max.