Roller coaster

Wow, what a roller coaster these past few days have been... I am completely exhausted mentally and physically.

We got the news Sunday morning that the Governor was closing all schools starting Wednesday. Mr. E called an emergency staff meeting Sunday at 12:45 to talk about our school's plan and I didn't get home until 9:15pm. But, Mr. E and I had a plan in place for how to do eLearning with our students and we showed them what to do today. We only had a half day of school (following what Nicollet did). New Ulm kids stayed the whole day (New Ulm is staying open Monday and Tuesday to go over things, off Wednesday).

Instead of using the two weeks to plan, we're starting e-Learning tomorrow. Every day my class will 'tune in' at 8:30 via Microsoft Teams (our IT guys actually helped us get things set up). We'll do devotions, religion, and read-aloud, plus talk about what types of things we need to do for the day. After about an hour, they'll be turned loose to do independent work. They'll have another live lesson with Mr. E every day for math. Science/social studies will be a toss up if they're doing live lessons or working on their own. I might make videos for them to watch. We'll see.

So it was a lot of work to set everything up, but hopefully it will be smooth-ish sailing while we're out. Some sources say three weeks, four weeks, eight weeks, or the rest of the year. But officially, our physical school is closed from now until March 27th.

Yesterday, prepping for the break, I was so stressed my body physically ached. I couldn't fall asleep and when I did, it wasn't very restful. Some people have been saying, "Oh, I wish I could have two weeks off!" Yeah, I do too.

Today school was CRAZY. I had my students bring the device they'd be using at home so we could practice a video call and log into everything. One student stayed home, but she was able to tune in and hear what we were doing. Of course all the kids were riled up. Thankfully my voice is pretty much back, so I could compete with them. They all had tons of questions, which I answered as best I could.

Mr. E's class joined ours for a while so they could figure out how to log on. My poor meltdown kid had a rough day and I didn't have time to coach him through it. My rope was very short today and I'm afraid I wasn't as patient with him as I should've been. We ate lunch early at 11:00 so the kids would be done in time for the bus at 11:45. Mr. E wanted to do math, so my day with the 5-6th graders ended at 10:30. That's only two hours to explain all the technical stuff about e-school and how to do it. But we did it! We also went over each spelling group's instructions for the week, finished up spelling tests from last week, and packed everything we might need for the next however-many weeks into backpacks. I convinced some of the 7-8th graders to bring 'fun' books home to read.

After the Nicollet kids left, I had two kids for the rest of the day. They had some recess in the gym, worked on an art project, tidied our classroom/the school a bit, ate leftover ice cream from the cancelled Lenten meals (all the kids who stayed behind did), and finally went home on the bus. Now, I am going to go run errands and take the evening off!