When our school closed down before Spring Break we thought the kids would get to go back at some point.  However once the state was shutdown that chance became less likely.

After Spring Break the school was still trying to figure out what they were doing. They couldn’t guarantee every student had access to a computer or internet. While they were figuring it out I wanted the kids to be doing something so I started our own homeschooling. We had a math book still, I had an old science experiment book and I know art so we started there. Each day they’d do math from their math book. We’d just pick a page and do it. They had to read for 45 minutes then I would email them some questions they had to answer and respond back to. Then they’d do a science experiment from my book. Jaelee still had her bass clarinet so she’d practice that every other day while Jayse practiced typing with keyboarding exercises. Then I’d have them do some cooking. They learned to make brownies, cakes and many other deserts.

It was working out pretty well. Then the school finally decided what they were doing. They were going to email and print packets each student could do. The packet wasn’t going to be counted or graded. The grade they had one school ended was the grade they would keep for the year. They could however, re-do work and improve their grades. They both had grades they could improve so we worked really hard on that. We did pick up a packet to work on, we tried it for the first week but without any instruction from the teachers we found out real quick it took much longer than they said it would. In the math section alone in the part the teacher said would take us an hour each day took us 3. We could only connect with each teacher on Monday from 1-3, every teacher was only available during that time. We had many tears, yelling and lots of frustration trying to do those packets. Since they did not count towards grades after the first week we ditched them and went back to my version of schooling.

After all this the kids were able to get their grades up for the end of the year which is all I could ask during this.

Since we had to do so much home schooling I only thought it was fair we had our own yearbook so you’ll see below the Thornton Middle School yearbook.

I taught the kids how to draw and scale from a picture. Jaelee drew this free hand looking at a picture from a DVD.

This is Jayse’s from a Dairy of a Wimpy kid book.

Then we learned to draw from a projection and then color it using colored pencils.

We had to go to the school to clean out the kids lockers. It was so weird, they only let 10 kids in at time and they had to stand in this long line 6 ft apart.

We had these tin can robots the kids got for Christmas from my mom I believe that we did for science one day.