This Week OFF From School

Well folks, week 1 of self isolation is behind us.  As an introvert I can honestly say that it isn't so bad.  I've managed to fill my time with some online shopping, baking, FINALLY organizing my classroom materials into a filing cabinet, basement workouts, long walks, and some crafting.

Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies

Buckeye Brownies

Hopefully we are all doing all right out there.  Avoiding others as much as possible and staying healthy!

Next week is officially spring break and then we've got one more week (at least without school).  If your schools have been closed longer than here I would be curious to know if they are planning to extend the school closures or if plans are still in place for students to start returning to their classes soon.

Easter Art Ideas

Here we are again with another holiday quickly approaching.  I'm doing this one a little earlier than what I typically do because spring break starts next week (and I don't plan to really be posting).

Anyways, lets get right into it!

I will have a link to a supply list and instructions for how to do each of these!

This first one is my absolute favourite.  Insta Bunnies

There are pictures on the link of what other teachers did with the bunnies too... all super adorable!

These "Easter eggs" are gorgeous you can find the instructions here 

Tin Foil Easter Egg

You may recall about a year ago one of the classes I was going into was doing string art... they were finding it challenging because they couldn't hammer nails into the boards, and then needles weren't holding the string.  Well, I think this paper plate string art is super adorable for Easter and likely not too difficult for even young students (though you may have to punch all the holes)!

Shaving Cream Easter Eggs

Suncatcher Easter Eggs

What kind of art projects do you do in your classroom for Easter?

 Share them in the comments!

If you are looking for art ideas for different times of the year here are a few other posts I have done:

Spring Art

Valentine's Day Art

Winter Art

This Week at School

What an odd week at school this was...

For those of us that are living under a rock (but still somehow manage to read here) there is a virus sweeping through the world called the Corona Virus.  People are getting sick and even dying from it so it's very serious.  Last Friday the province I live in announced that it would be closing schools for 3 weeks starting on the 23rd (so this week was our last week of school).  Now, they say 3 weeks and I really hope that's all the time we need but people are also saying that it might be until May and others are saying it might be for the rest of the year... which isn't ideal for someone like me who relies on schools being open and teachers being away.

Anyways, this week at school..

On Monday I think there were roughly 100/500 student absent.  The majority of my classes had a decent amount in them except for my homeroom which dropped from 11 in the morning to only 6 still attending by the end of the day.

On Tuesday I had one student in my classroom (and for the remainder of the week).  Needless to say she got everything she needed to finished and is likely leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of her class.

By Wednesday a 2nd class was down to only 1 student that I taught.  It was at this time I decided that we likely weren't going to be doing much teaching anymore.

Which brings us to Thursday where I brought a big bag of easy to learn games.  I taught a group of students Farkle and they loved it so much we found instructions to play online and they continued to play it even when I wasn't with them... which is awesome because it does involve a lot of math.

And by Friday we had our first class of no students.  The entire school (which normally has over 500 students) was down to just 38 students.  I baked cookies in the morning with a few girls (and then we ate the cookies) and played some Skipbo... and that was pretty much my day.

This was what my classroom looked like at the end of the day... those chairs that are taken off the tables are the only chairs we took down that day.

Anyways, there is officially no school on Monday and students are expected to log in online to see what their assignments are for the day... hopefully some of them actually do this.  I'm unsure of what that means for my blog as I rely on things happening at school for a large part of my content.  I THINK, for at least the next 3 weeks, I'll be posting just once a week (plus a TWAS) on Wednesday's.  Hopefully it only lasts 3 weeks.

Stay safe everyone and stay healthy!

Storyathon

Have you heard of Storyathon?

It's a free online event where students are encouraged to write stories that are exactly 100 words long.  100 words isn't a lot so not only does this encourage student writing but it isn't too daunting of a task and helps students really think about the words they are using and the impact they have in their stories.  Plus, as a teacher if you are grading these stories you aren't having to sit through pages and pages of a single story that is going no where... slowly (or is it just me that disliked teaching English because of this?)