Program Updates – Piloting New Resources for Students, Teachers, and Families

April 10, 2020

We hope everyone is staying safe and healthy! Heart Tutoring will be piloting various ways to support students, teachers, and families, and we wanted to give you a quick update as of early April. Schools, please contact your Program Coordinator or Program Manager to continue to let us know how we can help!

Students
CMS has paired our 4^th and 5^th graders with digital devices for online learning and correspondence with their teachers, while 1^st-3^rd grade students, who make up the majority of Heart Tutoring students, are learning through printed/mailed paper packets. CMS is focusing on meal distribution, instructional plans, and remote supplemental learning resources. We are continually updating ways to provide COVID-19 related support in the community on our blog post here.

Support through Heart Tutoring
Teachers and principals have shared the need for math support with differentiated content – meaning, content at each student’s different learning level. We have begun a series of iterative pilots to share videos and bilingual directions of key games in Heart Tutoring’s curriculum, starting with our “Combinations to 10” concept notebook (view here). The activities can be viewed using a cell phone and played with household objects. Newly created “game boards,” aligned with Heart Tutoring’s curriculum, have also been well-received by district curriculum specialists and schools beyond Heart Tutoring’s typical reach (example here).

Students and families can also access information through our this newsletter and others with tips for supporting students at home, virtual learning resources, and ways to bring math into new daily routines. We have also worked with other CMS partners to share resources as part of a larger backpack distribution and are working on plans to mail math kits and cards from tutors to the students.

Families can also access resources at the main families page, www.hearttutoring.org/families.

We are grateful to our partners and donors for making all of this possible.

Gratitude
Thanks to the community’s support over the past year, Heart Tutoring staff, including hourly employees, can continue to count on receiving a paycheck through the remainder of the program year. THANK YOU to our donors for helping to minimize negative impacts to the community in this way and making it possible for the team to pivot to new ways to support students, school partners, and families.

We have also been touched and inspired by several of our largest foundation and corporate partners who have reached out proactively to express support and flexibility. We were thrilled to learn in the past two weeks that Wells Fargo and Brighthouse Financial are continuing school-sponsorship level grants at $40,000 and $50,000, respectively, supporting the 2020/21 school year!!

April is National Volunteer Month, so stay tuned throughout the month as we highlight our awesome tutors and their dedication to helping students succeed!