Snow days aren’t as fun as I’d imagined they would be!

The view out my back window

Today we are snow day #2. Tomorrow, we’ll have snow day #3. I grew up in Florida, so snow days are still a relative novelty to me. Since I’m still in the South (Atlanta area), we don’t get that much snow very often. In fact, this is the most snow we have in the five years we have lived here. Plus it’s cold and icy. I’m sure you have heard about it on the news. The Atlanta area is virtually shut down.

AND I’M GOING CRAZY!

The first day was okay. But today, it’s getting a  bit much. Knowing we have another day off tomorrow is really getting to me. I am sitting here realizing I will need to re-think how I will teach the freshwater unit I am in the middle of right now. We will make up our snow days, but only one of them this grading period. I hope we get to go back to school on Thursday, but it’s up in the air right now.

At this point, I am realizing that I have not done a good job at encouraging my kids to visit our class web site – especially in the chance of snow days like we are having right now. I feel like I could be using this time to have a really good dialogue with my kids, but I have not prepared them to think in this way. They know to visit if they are absent, and we visit the site often on days we are in the computer lab, but I feel like now that we are all at home, we should be doing so much more.

So, I am curious. Have you set up a system for your students to interact with you when school is not in session? How did you go about creating that culture?

And finally, how can I keep from going crazy during my snow days? 😉

By Janelle

Space geek, science nerd extraordinaire. That's me! Want to know more, visit the About page.

4 comments

    1. That’s true. They do need time to be kids. We so often rob them of those great experiences. I need to remember when they are older they will look back on the great Atlanta snowstorm of 2011.

      I just figured by day #3, they would be bored!

  1. I feel that sometimes the best learning students can do is getting out there and enjoying their natural environment. I think nature’s provides its own classroom in situations like this and than when you get back to the classroom students are motivated to share their experiences and build on their knowledge.

    1. Great point, Jodie. You are right. In fact, we will be studying weather soon. We were talking about the water cycle last Friday, so we had discussed precipitation. We even talked about the differences between sleet, snow, and freezing rain. Then, Sunday night, we had snow, and Monday we had sleet and freezing rain. I could not have arranged first hand experiences like that for them in the classroom.

      This will also be one of the times they tell their kids, “I remember the snowstorm of 2011. Atlanta shut down for X number of days.”

Leave a Reply to Janelle Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: