Whiteout

The end of the polar vortex is in sight! Light fluffy snow drifted down pretty much all day, which my earth science students could tell you means a different kind of air front is moving in. 

My 5-6th graders tried to convince me it was bad enough outside we should call school off for the rest of the day. "Miss H! It's a total whiteout out there!" One of them held a small piece of white paper over the window. "See?"

My response was not what he hoped for, so he tried again, this time pulling down the white window shades on all the windows. "Look! You can't see anything out there! We better go home."

"Eh, if we can't see anything, it's too dangerous for you to go home! We better just stay at school. We'll have a sleepover."

They weren't enthused about that idea either. 

Really, it only snowed a half an inch. Some nice gentleman student scraped a path from my classroom porch to my car door. I saw that he also made a path to Mr. and Mrs. E's house and from the door to the other teachers' cars. Such a thoughtful guy!

PS- We finally did our science lab of extracting DNA from strawberries. It's way easier than it sounds. The rubbing alcohol has to be super cold to make it work the best, and because I left it outside last night after school, it was and the lab worked perfectly! Each group got a good amount of stringy, white DNA. One girl had the bright idea to examine it under a microscope, so we prepared a few slides and got to take a look! Awesome!

Because I wanted to have enough time for the lab, we swapped English and science time. The lab wrapped up before lunch and English was at the end of the day. Teaching English isn't my favorite subject, and I like to end the day teaching something I'm excited about, so that was a bit of a let down, but my students were very productive! They also couldn't convince me to read-aloud extra and skip the lesson. 😏