Distance Learning 2.0

SCHOOL HAS BEGUN. As of Wednesday, August 26th, the school year is officially in session--from afar. Our school district is doing distance learning all online, while we [continue to] wait for COVID-19 to back off. Jeff is able to teach online from his classroom, which is a great setup for him since he has unlimited quiet and much faster internet there than he has at home. On Tuesday, I helped him lug his various electronic devices into his classroom. 

The first day of school was anticlimactic on the home front. No special outfits, no new school supplies, no backpack assembling. No pristine front porch pictures. No waiting for the bus. Well, ok. We did do front porch pictures, but nobody wore special new clothes or backpacks. We did wait at the bus stop, but rather than picking up the kids and taking them to school, the bus delivered school lunches to us. It was so strange! Nothing felt new or different. Although Jeff leaving for work was a novelty after nearly six months of having him home.

Jay started middle school! He is in sixth grade, and has five different classes: orchestra (still waiting to see how that will work online, haha), math, science, English language arts, and enrichment (PE, etc). He seems so grown up with his class schedule. When he filled out my homemade beginning of the school year info page, he wrote that he is most excited about "becoming one with the computer." That's our Jay, with his quirky sense of humor. 

On Wednesday afternoon, Rose and I put our masks on and met with her teacher in the classroom for half an hour. It was nice to have some masked-face-to-masked-face time with her nice teacher. Rose is a fourth grader! On her homemade school preview worksheet, Rose wrote that she is most excited about online learning and least excited about online learning. It kind of makes sense if I don't think about it too hard.

On Friday, Amber and I met with Amber's kindergarten teacher. Amber completed some assessment activities, had her picture taken (masked), and took home a school district-issued iPad for home learning. On her before-school worksheet, Amber said she was most excited to get her own iPad. Amber is a kindergartener! I never thought this day would come, and now that it's here, it's even weirder than I ever could have imagined all of those times I thought about it back in the pre-pandemic world. 

Online school is a beast. Here's hoping that we can find some beauty in it this year!

 

Our home library seemed like an appropriate backdrop for our traditional back to school picture on day one of school-at-home.

Monsieur White, setting up his electronic classroom. He doesn't have to wear a mask when he's in his room alone, but the sweet janitor held the door open for us while we lugged in boxes, so we put our masks on.

Before the first day of school, I like to have the kids clean the playroom. It was a terrible mess, but they actually cleaned the whole room and organized it without my help/criticism. This was the first time they've ever done it 100% on their own before.

Jay, ready to become one with his computer. Sixth grade, here he comes!

The kindergartener!

Rose the fourth grader, rarin' to go.

I couldn't resist doing some barefoot first day front porch pictures.

We had Amber hold up a zero for kindergarten, haha. I felt a little bad about that. I probably should have looked up sign language for the letter K. Except I just did that and the K looks like a 2. Oh well. 

These crazies usually only have 1-2 "normal-ish" pictures in them before things degenerate. Then again, this type of picture is far more normal for them than pose-and-smile pictures.

They wanted scholarly reading pictures in front of the bookshelf, although Rose is holding a book she read in first grade, Amber can't read yet, and Jay is holding an empty notebook.

Lunch delivery! Our school district has universal free lunch for all kids, so they are employing the bus drivers to deliver the lunches individually. It was fun to see an actual school bus on the first day of school! Now we wait at the bus stop every morning at 8am to pick up the kids' lunches.

It begins: When kindergarten gets fully underway, Amber will have something minuscule and kinder-appropriate like 30 minutes of computer time per day, but she has far more electronic stamina than that! I have been letting her get on various preschool and kindergarten learning websites like Starfall to help her feel more scholarly like her big sibs.

Busy bees.

Amber loves swords.

Rose likes inventing tinker toy weapons and interesting sheaths for them. This one looks like a scary Viking version of a breast pump to me, as rude as that sounds, and I have to laugh every time I look at this picture. Hahahahahahaa!

AMBY, in her kindergarten classroom for the first (and possibly last) time. Maybe in springtime she'll be able to go to school in person.

She had to run on all 100 numbers in the counting grid on our way back to the car.