For me, I had a teacher workday on Monday, where I went into the building in the afternoon once Zac came home from work to watch the kids. I put all my digital files from the school network onto my google drive. I packed up my binders for each of the remaining units and made sure to bring my books home too. I gathered up all of my grading (tons of it) and cleaned out all the desk so there wouldn't be a rotten banana peal or something awful to discover later. I met briefly with a teacher I collaborate with all the time (Lisa Springle) and we made a plan for how to kick off our Romeo and Juliet unit. It his hard to explain how hard it was to rethink everything and figure out how to do everything online. The irony was I had planned out the rest of the year down to the day, and it was supposed to be smooth sailing from here on out, because we show them so many movie clips from Romeo and Juliet that you get a chance to catch your breath in this unit. All that was gone in one fell swoop and we were back to square one. But we came up with a plan and got our first lesson ready to be posted, so it was productive. It's so nice to not have to go through this transition alone.
On the homefront, for Simon, his teacher had had the foresight to send him home with a bunch of worksheets on Friday. So I just picked 3 each day--one math, one reading, and one spelling, for him to do each day. He resisted, but I wouldn't let him play until he got it done. The irony is that he's a stellar student at school, but a limp noodle at home.
For Alice, I could let her be more creative. Her teacher hadn't sent anything home, so I let her come up with her own learning ideas each day, and she could use some apps on the iPad for math. Her teacher was emailing and telling us to get on all these school learning sites, but they were hard to access from the iPad. Zac had mentioned a long time ago possibly getting Alice a Chromebook, and it seemed like now we definitely needed one. I suggested he order it right away before everybody else trying to homeschool their kids realized they also needed one and the prices went up or they sold out.
We got through the week, just barely, with me watching the kids in the morning and overseeing their school work, while simultaneously being inundated with emails all morning. After lunch, Zac would take over and I would take a walk then go up to the office to work all afternoon, evening, and night to get the next day's lessons ready. It was intense, and I would start to spiral if I imagined doing this for the rest of the year. It just didn't seem sustainable.
