Spin

Today's religion lesson was on the 6th commandment. In other years, we've gotten into some pretty heavy class discussions on this topic, and with this class's family situations I was a little leary. But it actually went really well and we steered clear of the really touchy aspects of this commandment while still getting the full meaning of it.

We did highs and lows today at the end of our Morning Meeting. It sounds like a lot of them went out fishing or played outside in the nice weather. My high was that I participated in a virtual trivia tournament (one of my aunts invited me to join the team she plays with). It was really fun; I had a blast scouring the internet for answers to the questions (announced on the radio). We communicated via Facebook messenger to go over what we found and what answers our team leaders submitted to the official scorers. Our team placed 38th out of 102 teams! My low was that I didn't go outside for a walk on Saturday when it was so gorgeous out. I had planned to take a break from trivia, but I got sucked in and never did. One of my students pointed out, "Well, if you forgot about going outside, that means you were really having a good time for you to forget about it!" Good point!

One of the other 6th grade boys said for his low, "My low is that when I get bored during school, I spin around in my office chair and I get really dizzy." Hmm...

That comment stuck in my mind, along with the number of students I'm missing things from. They're actually pretty good about turning things in when we have drop days, all except for Writing City which is our English assignments online. I don't want to overwhelm parents or students and I think Writing City might just be too much for them to handle. So I revamped our e-learning plan, or put a different "spin" on it. Using a tweaked form another teacher came up with, I feel pretty good about the level of work/creativity/accountability my students will need to do each day. If you want to see it, check it out here. I'm going to give my students a preview on Wednesday to see if they have any concerns. If not, we'll roll it out next week (probably).

Why not tomorrow? Well, I want to sleep on it a bit. Plus, the school board is meeting tomorrow night to talk about what school will look like in May. I had previously mapped out the rest of the year as far as science/social lessons, but I'm probably going to need to revamp those plans based on what's decided at the meeting (and/or announced by the governor) and I don't want to redo my plans more than I need to. So. Patience Miss H!