1!

My kids said this one was too easy. Oh well, it's the last day. We finished Where the Red Fern Grows without going over time today. I just teared up a little; I didn't full out cry! Yesterday I went through two tissues during read aloud.

This morning got off on a bit of a rough start. I got to school five minutes before class was supposed to start (not great, but doable to start class on time). But as I unpacked my bag, I realized I forgot my school laptop at home. My desktop doesn't have a camera or mic, so I wouldn't be able to have class. I was about to message my students saying class would start late when I remembered the broken laptop someone returned to school a month ago. The screen is cracked and parts are dark, but it has a camera and mic! So I quick started it and logged on. But Microsoft Teams wasn't installed. Okay, just sign on via the website. That worked just fine for most of the morning.

Even though we're ending the year virtually, I tried to make it a little special by doing a class Kahoot for science. Everyone had joined in the game, so I went to share my screen and discovered that you can't screenshare while using Teams on their website (at least when your browser is Microsoft Edge, I think Chrome would allow it). So. What to do. Try to use my desktop to run Kahoot and make everyone re-join a new game? Quick download Teams on the laptop while they wait? I decided to download Teams while we did highs and lows. One kid had the great idea to do highs and lows of the year. A lot of them said Camp Omega as a high, virtual learning as a low. My high is that we read a lot of good books this year and my low is we couldn't do the musical.

The 7-8th graders convinced Mr. E to have 5-8th grade trivia. I make a class that had all 20 of them, plus Mr. E and me. Then while they did their last day of math, I speedily made a Kahoot. I was just going to do random trivia, but then I had the brainstorm to do trivia of our school. I took pictures of places around school, teacher desks, kids' cubby areas, etc. and asked which room/teacher they belong to. Other questions involved our school theme, mascot, name of Christmas program, field trips we did earlier in the year, how long teachers have been here. Since I put it together, Mr. E could play! He started off okay because he'd helped me come up with some of the questions. But he didn't do so hot on the 'guess this teacher's desk' questions.

My favorite quote of the day was for the question about Mrs. L's desk. Before I took the picture she made me wait while she cleared everything off so it looked neater. The first thing the 7-8th graders said when they saw the picture was, "oh, look, she must've cleaned it." 🤣

It was really fun and made our last day a little more festive. It was the bit of levity we all needed. My kids have been working really hard to get all their work done. Some have been slacking on their daily work and now they're facing the consequences. I've heard from a few parents that their kids are having meltdowns and panic attacks at home. Sigh. That's not what I want to have happen. We've extended deadlines for those kids to hopefully ease some of the stress. I will be really glad when this year gets officially wrapped up. We are having one more pick-up day next Friday for families to get their report cards and everything else that might have been left at school.