Friday, December 18, our last school day before winter break concluded our third week of having school 100% online for everyone. Well, almost everyone. Special Education programs were able to support kids coming back to school Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 8:45 am to 12 pm. There were enough Educational Aides (EA’s) available to also bring in kids who either had limited or no Internet connectivity at home or had been struggling to complete any work from home. Because of our Special Education and Resource department, we the Teachers were able to focus on teaching all our students online and as far as I know, no General Education Teachers had to come to school to work with kids face-to-face during these last three weeks. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to stop and reflect since this school year started because I haven’t had a second. The work we’ve had to do to accommodate the needs of our students, whether they were able to physically come to school or whether they “attended” school from home has been more work than I’ve ever had to do, and I’m no slouch! I consider myself a slight workaholic and working during a pandemic has pushed me to my limits! I guess I’ll do some reflecting by going back in time. A few days into break and I’m finally ready to do some writing!
I opted to teach from home even though Wi-Fi at school was far superior because I felt safer at home. So I went from this setup at school:
To this setup at home:
These last three weeks felt less stressful than the 13 weeks of fully remote online teaching we did in the spring. Our schedule and program changed slightly from the spring. For starters, we began each day with an 8:45 am whole 6th grade Zoom meeting. We kept our hybrid schedule of formal activities Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays with Wednesdays being our unstructured day where teachers could hold office hours while also getting some work time to prepare online curriculum. Our morning Zooms were for half an hour with all three of us, me the Science Teacher, the ELA/SS Teacher, and the Math Teacher getting our kids off to a great start. We put together a sample daily schedule for kids.
We stressed to kids the importance of doing a little work every day and to try to get work done in all three core classes to avoid falling behind in any one class. Mondays at 1:30 I had an hour for Science, Tuesdays were for ELA/SS, and Thursdays were for Math. One pleasant and welcomed change we made this year was that all three of us were at all the Zooms, even if we were not leading it like during our 1:30 subject-area sessions. It’s very decent leading a Zoom with another pair of eyes monitoring the waiting room and the chat. Fridays we chose to do something different. After seeing so many kids engage in none of our school work during the spring, we agreed to make Fridays Passion Project day. Our goal was to tap into whatever kids were doing at home anyway and tie that back to school to connect them back to school and give them a sense of success and belonging. This last Friday, after a fun launch, Friday Dec 4, and a fun breakout room session for kids to share ideas and ask each other questions on Friday, Dec 11, we had our first two 6th graders share their passion projects live on Zoom!
These past three weeks we saw more kids attend our morning kickoff Zooms than our afternoon Zooms. We went from just under 70% of our 60 sixth graders to just over 80% attend our morning Zoom sessions thanks mostly to our in-school program brining in many of the kids who for one reason or another have struggled to engage in school from home and partly to our strong school-to-home communication powered by Bloomz. Our afternoon sessions brought back anywhere from 62 to 67% of our 6th graders. Attendance was sporadic so aside from a handful of students, most of our 6th graders attended a few to some of our Zooms.
I do want to note here that we decided to go with Zoom over Google Meet, which our district recommends and supports, because I was fortunate enough to have an account that is has the premium features and we prefer Zoom for meetings with over 30 kids. Google Meet works well enough for office hours and helping kids one-on-one but for large groups, we were happy to be able to use Zoom.
I do have to share an amazing resource for those using Jamboards and Google Slides for their online teaching. You have to follow Esther Park on Twitter. Here’s her website full of free resources. We used her Breakout Room Roles and they were amazing for our Passion Project Breakout session!
So much more to think about. This, my 30th year teaching, is the strangest ever. I did get a new action figure, The Mandalorian, to add to my collection. Ah, the little things that make me feel good. 🙂
