Done with the first week of distance learning "school". Outside of the communication issue on Monday morning with the Zoom "outage" the week was fairly smooth from a technology stand point. My daughter's fourth grade class went rather well. Zoom call from 9am-12:15pm everyday and even managed to have breakout rooms for small group projects. She had to take video of some engineering assignments and was able to do that on her own. Pretty independent.
1st grade experience was not nearly as positive. After being told by the teacher last weekend that the kids would be on a continuous Zoom call from 9am-12pm with breaks scattered in there, it has yet to happen. Zoom starts at 9am but ended by 10am through yesterday. Today our son comes out at 10am and says they have a recess and will be going back at 10:30am. Sure enough, the teacher has a countdown on the call and it is still going. He jumps back on at 10:30am only to come out three minutes later. We ask and he says they came back and sang happy birthday to one of the kids and that they were now done for the day. WTF? An hour a day of Zoom with roughly 30 minutes of work outside of that is a joke. Really, really hoping this is just a first week thing and that it will ramp up next week and the following.
What are other experiences like for those of you with K-2nd grade kids?
First few days was a little slow, more getting the teacher and kids used to working in google classrooms and the technology. Learning names and faces and going over the different visual things she included for the kids to show on the cameras for answers and help. This minimizes the kids from all yapping and talking too much. Works great.
they’ve gotten into some good work though, not straight thru, but 8-930 and then a break to work on assignments. Then back again, then recess and lunch, and I think they finish around 1-2? They’ve had some assessments to do, and some class reading type of stuff so they are really getting engaged. End of the day the kids get to share something, show the class, or just plain say hi to a classmate. Been very very impressed with the teacher. She’s called after some classes to check on the boys even.
This is for 1st grade too, by the way.
our county is about to try a slow soft return. Smaller kids go back first if you want, then they bring in more grades. Online dashboard showing mid count, class size. Any out breaks in schools, staff, etc.
masks are required in our county( shocker, as not aware of many that are here ), and the larger schools and high schools, they will have staggered attendance days, keeping the same groups flowing together, cleaning inbetween the groups, with hopes it keeps any issues lower.
we are gonna wait a month and see how it goes, before letting the boys venture in. Class won’t be more than 12-18 kids I think anyways. Our PreK kid is going to a private school and it’s got like 8 kids. Let’s hope for the best, but so far the online hasn’t been awful.