We started home school, for the two that weren't already home schooled, on Monday, the 23rd. Miss A had to design her child by flipping a coin for a science assignment, which is above. We have had, so far, a half week and a full week of virtual school. We have had two opposite experiences. Miss R's class seems to be going great. Her teacher does daily meetings on google classrooms. The kids get on 15 minutes before her, so they all talk and mess around together. I feel like this has been so helpful! R gets to see and hear her school friends, and it seems so normal the way they interact together. I think any vestige of normalcy we can cling to is super helpful for these kids. Anyway, the teacher goes over the assignments that are given that day. The assignments are all fairly clearly labeled on the google classroom page. R clicks on them, and does them. Some are some pretty dumb slide show things that are probably put out by the school for the whole third grade to do. Others are games from abcya, math man, spelling city, and the like. Miss R has fun doing them, and her teacher is available for video chat for a couple hours, so she usually has a question of some sort, probably just an excuse to get to talk to Miss Lewis. So for R, virtual school has been fun and something she can do pretty much on her own. I make her do science and history with Miss M, and sometimes language arts and beast academy for math. I (kind of) make her keep a reading log, and we have lots of other chores and tasks on the charts where I keep track of their days.
For Miss A, virtual school has been frustrating and stressful. Her seventh grade team is based on schoology, instead of google classrooms. I don't know if that's the problem or what. But I haven't noticed any video teaching going on. She just had assignments with due dates. The problem has been turning them in. Some teachers don't get email at home, so any assignments she emailed in got marked incomplete. For a couple days, we couldn't get our scanner to work, so we took pictures of her papers with my phone, and tried to send those in. But the teachers didn't like those. She did one set of science worksheets three times, and they still show up on her grades as incompletes. It has been a mess! So much so that we are probably going to pull her out to just home school. This week, currently, is spring break. We have been doing straight home school this week (I know it's spring break, but we're locked in our house! I figure we may as well do school...) and she seems to like it well enough. Rumor is that they are not likely to return to school this school year. So why force her to wade through all the technical difficulties?
The week of the 23rd we were babysitting an eight year old Japanese girl who's mom works with B. Again, I sent them all out to the playground as much as possible to soak in the sun and fresh air. At that point we still hadn't heard of any virus around base. I could just tell from the panicked news back in the states that we were going to tighten up restrictions here any day. On Tuesday, the 24th, B came home from work. I had made a new batch of soda bread, and I had the leftover colcannon (I made quite a vat of on Saturday, since I had free potato scrubbing...) all warmed up and ready for supper.
But B had heard that a restriction to stay on base was in the works, and if so, he wanted one last visit to Hamazushi first. I messaged his xo's wife to see if she knew anything, and she answered she didn't officially, but that her family was currently out in town eating out, if that helped. So we went out for sushi. Colcannon can wait.
As usual, A was extremely daring. Even tried cuttlefish.
R sticks with ramen. Although we ordered her some "hamburg" sushi.
M is deliberate in her sushi choices, but still daring. I stick with my favorite smoked duck with onion and mayo. Yummmm! We stopped by the fabric store as well. Interestingly enough, we stocked up on elastic! I thought we might need scrunchy making supplies. Now we are using it to sew face masks.
The next day I continued with the theme of "hurry and get anything you need off base before the word comes officially that we are trapped" and walked to Homes.
I bought a few more plants, went one last time to my beloved Daiso... Stopped at Umikaze park to look at the tulips. Goodbye Japan! I'll miss you!
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