My children’s preschool teachers are AMAZING. They created bags of activities, recorded themselves reading books for circle time and hosting Jesus time, and they joined the pastor to record a chapel message. I WISH I were half that put together as a remote-learning teacher!

Hubster teaches three section of junior World Religions, and three sections of sophomore Epistles. I have two sections of AP English Language and Composition. Our classes today looked something like this:

We are continuing on our block schedule but with shorter classes. We schedule minimum 10-minute video sessions at the beginning using Zoom, and then do our best to give them time to work on course stuff with minimal homework and ideally limited technology use since we don’t always know their internet abilities (one of my students is one of EIGHT kids so bandwidth is limited at their house!!).

There are three things my AP students need to work on as they continue the year: AP test practice, a research paper, and their college application portfolios that they complete for their final project. I don’t know the status of the AP tests. As of March 16, this is what the College Board released:

“The AP Program is developing resources to help schools support student learning during extended closures, as well as a solution that would allow students to test at home, depending on the situation in May.”

– The College Board

The name of the game is Flexibility, but I have not had a chance to organize the best way via the internet alone. On the bright side, if my students do not do well on the AP test, I can blame Coronavirus instead of my teaching. That’s TOTALLY how that works, right?

…And home schooling

We have three kids: 5.5, 3, and nearly 9 months (and Annabelle, of course). In a small house. With two parents working remotely. Packed in as we are, I am determined to give this home school thing a go. I wrote up a “lesson plan” of sorts based on the preschool schedule for my oldest’s class and the materials shared by their teachers.

Yesterday I spent an hour cleaning and rearranging our play room into rough idea of “centers”…I’ll share more in another post. Although we didn’t quite make the whole planned schedule work, we managed most of it. It was tricky to squeeze in time for my own online classes, but tomorrow I don’t teach so I have more time to do some hands-on stuff.

This picture made me proud: Spartacus was helping Little Miss draw on the whiteboard for her “writing” lesson. She drew “ghosts.” Spartacus wrote dinosaur names from his book (Dinosaur Skeletons and Other Prehistoric Animals, if you also have a future paleontologist on your hands).

For kids whose favorite question is either “Can I have some fruit snacks?” or “Can I watch something?”, they did not ask once for either for the whole time we were in “school.” Instead, Spartacus led, always beginning with, “At my school, we…” Either way, by 2:30 this was Little Miss – she worked hard!