1st Day of School... Finally

What a crazy start to this school year! After two weeks of cancelations and delays due to nearby wildfire threats, we finally had a day of school!

This is what happens when I want a “nice” photo for my first day of school memories. These are fitting photos though. I especially love the sock situation. My kids do need new shoes, and I usually buy them for the start of school. But given that they are attending from home, I decided to wait this year. Not that they bothered to put on shoes anyway. Impressively, Ava is actually wearing a matching pair, while Wes dug a whole in his slippers that literally came out of the box an hour before this photo.

Comprehensive Distance Learning for us means that sometimes all six of us will be on zoom meetings at the same time. Jon works from home regardless and I start my own classes on Monday. I also participate in zoom style work meetings. Most of our issues today dealt with slow internet. We use CentryLink and have an Orbi system to broadcast our wifi about the house. We also have one school issued hot spot that allows for 20G a month and works through cellular signals. Finally we have a Verizon cellular plan that allows us to tether through our phones. Even with all of these options, we had issues with websites not loading at all and glitchy zooms. It looks like we will burn through the hot spot, with one child using it, in 10 days.

I set up all the kids on a large table that I usually use for crafts or puzzles. I picked up four colored trifold poster boards. The kids decorated them and we clipped important resources around them. Some have multiplication tables, some daily schedules, all have a dry erase folder and their weekly schedules. They each have their school issued Chrome book and a caddie with any implements they might need. I envisioned them needed to move to private spaces throughout the house, and this is a totally portable system (at lease with a couple of trips).

With headsets on everyone, it was eerily quiet for most of the day. Jon and I were able to deep clean the refrigerator and experiment making savory pies for lunch with hot water crust pastry. (Which turned out to be really easy, although a bit time consuming since we used individual ramekins). It felt a little neglectful, but most of school today was about making sure people could find their Zoom links and log in, understand the “rules”, and get to know each other a bit. So there wasn’t much heaviness about the “work”. The kids seemed pretty comfortable in this set up, for now. Which left a lot of house for Jon and I to be in.