Week 4 – April 13 to April 17 (back from spring break!):
School Closure Planning
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12
Week 13
Starting the 4th week of our school being closed, really my 3rd week teaching online, I had to extend the deadline for the Hydro Dynamics Project that we were working on in class before our schools closed! Had we still been in class together by now student teams would have robots built and testing their programs so we would still be working on the project. Some teams would even have already filmed their robots in action solving a water pollution problem and be preparing to write Public Service Announcement (PSA) blog posts to share what they learned about water pollution, share their solution to the water pollution problem, and give recommendations to preserve our watersheds and water ecosystems.
Sadly, from home, most students have done little to nothing for this project. Only five students have completed the research phase and only four of my 67 students have completed their PSA blog posts! Here are the four who have submitted a PSA post (if you could give them a read and leave them a comment, maybe I could entice more students to finish!):
Hydro Dynamics Challenge Blog Post
Help Save Spongebob! Keep our Water Safe!
Going slow is hard for me! I spend my day responding to students who post things or ask questions in Classcraft, responding to parents who ask questions in Bloomz, emailing with colleagues and staff dealing with school stuff or providing support, often tech support. At the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like I did much at all and yet I was busy all day and barely took any breaks! It’s weird because I don’t feel I’m impacting as many kids as when they are all in front of me. If I ever think that teaching students this way is better than having them acting out and not working and not listening to me in my classroom, I NOW KNOW I’M WRONG! At least when they’re in front of me I can see them and that makes such a difference. When they are in front of me I can sit with them, even one at a time, and talk and ask questions, and try to motivate. I can’t help kids who don’t watch my videos, who don’t read my Classcraft messages, and who don’t work on any of the assignments I am providing them when they are not in front of me!
Based off of Mike Kaechele’s blog post on helping students manage themselves, I put together the following Google Sheet to help students keep track of what they can be doing while quarantined at home along with due dates to give some structure to those students who benefit from that (click here if you don’t see a Google Sheet below):
I took some time during spring break last week to record a new YouTube playlist. I recorded five videos for a fake news activity I do with students in class, followed by 15 videos on my climate change unit, and then eight videos on ocean acidification. I made all the video unlisted because the climate change videos were of me sharing Alliance for Climate Change (ACE) Our Climate, Our Future video series like I would in class. Watching and pausing to comment. I just felt the need to do that because I did it in class often and feels normal. Since I can’t republish their videos on my YouTube channel I made the videos unlisted in the hopes that if only my students are watching them that would be okay considering what’s happening in our world. I did email ACE to let them know what I’m doing. No response yet.
The big question: will anyone watch my video recordings and those few who do watch, will they even get close to the end of the series (my videos last anywhere from four to seven minutes on average – I know, too long)??
My plan:
Continue to support those students who are working on their PSA blog posts this week so that some more can finish. And those who don’t finish? Be okay with that. Let it go. I have a few more fun things to offer this week for those who are ready: a COVID-19 breakout puzzle, maybe some other breakout puzzles if kids like them.
Then next week I will launch my Climate Change unit and share the video playlist. I think that will take us through the rest of the year even though I’d love to do more. One thing I’m saddened by is that this is the first year my Environment Stewardship Project, which we do as an Ocean Guardian School, has been greatly de-railed. For 18 years straight Chimacum 6th graders have been monitoring our neighborhood creek, planting trees, learning how to protect their watershed, studying the creek macros, and measure different water quality parameters. This year 6th graders got to trap and ID fish in our creek but nothing else! I was thinking of going down to the creek and recording myself getting this year’s water quality data for them to graph and analyze but it just seems so feeble. I’ll do it, because I don’t want to skip one year of data, but how sad that it’ll be me.
Alone.
Let’s see if I can do better this week and connect with more students. Or at least get then back into a learning routine.
