Week 13 (Last Week) – June 15 to June 19:
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 12
My top five 6th grade Science students, who completed the most assignments while at home, completed an average of 16 assignments of the 21 I had available for them. Of the 21 I made available to kids I only “required” 14. The other seven were fun activities, games, and surveys. One 6th grader did every single one of my assignments! The other 61 sixth graders averaged four assignments. Week 12 saw few students engage or even check in. Only the top three of my top five even continued to work last week. For my last Science Zoom Meeting 19 students showed up instead of the 28 I usually get. As of last night, Sunday night, only 12 kids even checked Classcraft since Friday (Fridays have seen very few students engaging with anything for me).
Even my eSports kids were getting very little done last week. We had our weekly Tuesday and Thursday Zoom check-in meetings and a bunch of them never showed up. Those that did show up only worked on their Camp Cispus recreation a little bit and only on the two days and times that we met (they didn’t plan any game time on their own like they had before). When even interest in Minecraft dwindles, something is going on. I hope they are all doing okay.
Plan for the Last Week
I don’t expect too many students to be checking in much less turning in work but I’ll be there for those who do. We’ve been having Language Arts/Social Studies Zoom Meetings Mondays at noon, Science Zoom Meetings Thursdays at 12:30, and Math Zoom Meetings Fridays at noon. Since the Primary school scheduled a end of the year staff wave on Thursday at 1:30 we at the elementary scheduled an elementary staff wave on Thursday at 2:30. We had our graduation staff wave/send-off Saturday and the Primary and Elementary staff wave will be much the same. Parents will drive their cars with their kids through the parking lots of each school as staff line up six feet apart to wave goodbye with signs and blowing bubbles. Families are not supposed to get out of their vehicles.
I was not about to have my Science Zoom at 12:30 on Thursday with those waving drive-bys to compete with and our Math teacher didn’t want to have his Math Zoom on the very last day of school so we will be combining our three Zooms on today, Monday, with our LA/SS teacher! We plan to have a scavenger hunt by putting the kids into three breakout rooms with each one of us. They will have a list of items and they will have send us all around the school to find as many items as we can. Then we will have them play some final Quizizz games or something else fun.
Planning for the Fall
Now it’s time to start planning for the fall. I’m working with our IT department and our district tech team as well as building committees to take the WA State guidelines for starting school in the fall and develop some plans (see my 10 things to do for the fall list). For the most difficult part of planning for the fall is all the schedules we will need to come up with in addition to a plan B and plan C and contingencies for another possible closure. Keeping kids apart and making sure they keep masks on all day seems impossible as well. But this is what we have to do.
