Back to School

The girls went back to school on Monday, February 8th. What a difference it made to me teaching from home without the distraction of my three little people! I feel like they're still coming down, but it's so good that they're back in school. I miss them, I do love being with them, and them being around, but online learning, ugh, it is not something that is good for everyone.

Sisters playing cards. The girls sure have their ups and downs, but watching them play together, I love it more than I can express.

After winter break the numbers were really high and so we didn't get to go back to school face to face. I can't remember now how much notice we got either, I think it was a week? We had a week of holiday time to reinvent our programs! My covid music program face to face is very different than online, needless to say, the planning and reinventing, it was a lot. Google classroom, google meets, it took a while to sort that out too. 

I remember with google meets I couldn't figure out why sometimes I had teacher controls and sometimes I didn't. Only to realize, I'm not even sure how many days into it, that if I wasn't the teacher that started the meet, I had no control. When I learned that, I created a bunch of new google classrooms, and started using separate links for all of my classes. I think the biggest frustration though, was not knowing how long it would last. Starting units and not knowing if we'd be able to finish them! 

There was one week in January - I think I was up to midnight every night planning. It was exhausting. However, once we knew when we were going back and it was time to wrap things up and do some fun things online, it wasn't too bad. The last week was lots of fun actually - taking advantage of everyone having a screen.

I'm not sure what the future holds for the rest of the school year, but I go back Monday. We all hope that we are back for good, that there won't be anymore interruptions, but who knows. The vaccine rollout has barely started, it will take time for numbers to be affected. Here's to our health and safety!