My pictures uploaded a little out of order, so these are from the end of August. School finally started!! After three weeks of teacher pre-planning it was finally time for the students to come back. The boys were ready to see other kids again!
James is in 4th grade this year and is loving it. He has three teachers: one for reading, one for math, and one for social studies/science. The kids stay in their assigned seat in their homeroom classroom and the teachers switch throughout the day. So when you walk into the class, you never know which teacher will be at the front teaching! His teachers are great and James is a big fan :)
Rett was ready for 1st grade! For weeks he kept asking me when it was time to go back to school. Finally I got to tell him that today was the day! His teacher is Mrs. Betts and he thinks she is really funny. She is an older woman from New York so she has a louder and more sarcastic sense of humor. You would think the kids would be nervous around her, but they love it!
It was also my first official day of teaching! It didn't really feel that different from the weeks of preplanning since we don't go into the class to work with our students until after the first week of school. Aside from morning taking temperatures and afternoon helping at the buses, I spent most of the week in my office working on legal paperwork that has to get done at the beginning of the year for the ESE students.
Our running group is still doing our early morning runs on the bridges on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is harder to wake up so early now that school is back in, but the sunrises are beautiful!
James got another yellow stripe in karate:
We had our annual themed teacher training and this year the theme was "survivor". We had challenges to compete in but there were a little more difficult with social distancing. I appreciated the effort though!
Fear factor gummy worm challenge: who could eat the entire plate of gummy worms first?
Teamwork in a race to use up an entire roll of toilet paper. It killed us all to waste that much toilet paper!!
Our book study this year was a book called "Relentless" written by a New Zealand man about his experiences in the school system and overcoming obstacles. The principal contacted him to see if she could get a discount on the large number of books she was ordering (always wheeling and dealing!) and he offered to zoom into our meeting! It was fun to hear him talk for a few minutes and he offered to do it again later in the school year.
Endurance challenge: how long can you balance on a tin can?
My mom came to help watch the boys for the three weeks of preplanning. Initially I thought that I wouldn't be allowed to take them with me like I have in the past, but the principal relaxed the rules and said that we could bring our kids as long as they stayed in our room with us and didn't wander around the school. I took turns bringing James and Rett to give them something else to do and give my mom a little break. They mostly played on the computer for the entire day: their definition of heaven!
We tried to trade a few of our hens for ducks, thinking that we would eat the ducks. On the way home the boys fell in love with the ducks, so now we have ducks. Fun.
We finally got enough extra frames to harvest some honey from our bees! Anthony bought an extractor this time around and the process was much quicker. We had so much fun, I am ready to get rid of most of our animals and just have bees. No more poop in my yard, just honey!
Don't look at James's quarantine haircut. We are all doing the best we can with what we've been given. LOL.
All the honey ready to be poured into bottles!
So much honey!!
My team leader bought us all apple shaped cupcake pops. So yummy!
Cub scouts started up again with a picnic pack meeting. They did fun goofy games that I would hate to lead, but the kids love it.
Of course, Rett had to put his fingers in his nose instead of in the air like everyone else. There's always that kid, right?
Anthony found a tiny baby turtle on our front porch! It is so strange to see it that far from water. We've had so much rain lately, it might have thought our front yard was a lake! We kept it for a few days and then released it back into our pond.
