Week 12 – June 8 to June 12:
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
Recap of Week 11:
With two weeks left to go in our school year and having THREE FULL MONTHS of this year be forced at-home distance learning, I’m just trying to make it to the end engaging as many students as I can in great learning experiences. Fridays continue to be the day we get the fewest students checking in this past Friday I got a few more check ins on Classcraft than usual. As of Sunday afternoon (each class has about 22 students), Per 1: six checked in between 10:30 am and 12:30 pm and only four checked in after 12:30 on Friday, Per 2: eight checked in, Per 3: only two checked in between 10:30 am and 12:30 pm and only ONE checked in after 12:30 on Friday! And Per 3 has the most kids showing up and attending my weekly Zoom meetings. Still, 14 to 16 kids checking Classcraft on a Friday was better than usual.
The rest of the week was pretty good, for forced distance learning that is. Thursday, I changed my planned weekly Science Zoom topic of water quality parameters and instead showed a free screening of the movie, Microplastic Madness, which was very good! I had 25 kids attend and four adult guests. Twenty-five out 66 isn’t great but considering that I have only been getting 27 or 28 kids show up regularly it’s what I expected.
My eSports team unanimously chose to work on another team building activity instead of competing in a PVP match. I was surprised because PVP, having kids actually go head to head against other kids in competition, seems like so much fun. I wonder if being quarantined is why working together in the virtual landscape of Minecraft is more appealing than competing? They wanted to either recreate our school on Minecraft or the camp that we went to this past fall, Camp Cispus. That was heart-warming and gives me insight into how much they are grieving the loss of being with their friends at school. So many of our kids enjoy recess and lunch so much because they to play with and be with their peers and friends that this is just so hard on them. I can see why getting together on Minecraft to just hang out and build together won out and the winner of what they are going to build – a recreation of Camp Cispus!
Plan for Week 12
As we wind our year down to these last two weeks I now have, out of 66 sixth graders, 15 have completed the Hydro Dynamics Challenge Public Service Announcement assignment that we had been working on since before school closed, 32 have completed the Think Like a Scientist fake news activity that unlocked the Climate Change research assignment, 13 have finished their Climate Change notes and of those 13 only 5 have written their follow-up blog post, 3 have completed their water quality notes and two of those have completed their final project blog posts! I also have an Ocean Acidification assignment that only one student has done and I don’t think anyone else except for maybe one other student will do that one. Here are the best of the posts students have submitted. Those were the main assignments that I asked 6th graders to work on during these 12 weeks of at-home, quarantined learning. Of the other fun assignments like Flipgrid check in, Google Form surveys, Kahoots, Gimkits, and Quizizz games I’ve had anywhere from 25 to 37 students completing those. The fun assignments that have gotten barely any 6th grader are the Legends of Learning games and the Minecraft challenges. I’m betting the Legends of Learning games, and even Minecraft, can’t compete with the games kids can play when they are at home all day!
So I’ll spend this week supporting students as best I can to complete the above assignments! Since 32 students have completed the Think Like a Scientist fake news activity then I want to help the remaining 19 who haven’t completed their Climate Change notes do that and then we can get the remaining 27 to do the Climate Change follow-up blog post! Thursday I’ll continue my water quality zoom lesson on pH and how it affects Chimacum Creek. I should also finish the series with turbidity and flow rate because next week I’m planning a quick, fun Zoom meeting because it’s the day before the last day of school and our school will be doing our good-bye waving on our campus as cars with parents and kids drive by.
I’ve already shared the following video to show students who haven’t completed the Think Like a Scientist fake news activity yet to help them start catching up (and frankly, many of us teachers here have offered students that we will still accept and check work over the summer because we’re not going anywhere and our school district is encouraging students to hold on to their school-issued laptops all summer):
And on a personal note, I finally ran a marathon! I did it mostly alone as part of a race that could not be attended with COVID-19 but at least I was still able to be part of the racing community.
