 to start my day a little bit differently today. It's 7.30, should we finish it? Because whenever I take it to work, I get so pissed that you're here. Commute time never gets old. Okay, I'm already here at school, but I wanted to just quickly, I'm hoping that my TV has been installed. I'm not gonna get my hopes up, but I'm wishing that my TV has been installed because that would be super nice to have and have that be ready. So I'm gonna take all of this junk in, just another quick little reminder. I've been using these mask brackets. I talked about them on my Instagram, but I've been using these mask brackets and they're so nice for like, if you have to wear the mask a long time, which I'm getting suited up and ready because, oh, I'm crooked, I'm gonna have to be crooked and that's gonna be fine. You guys don't care if I'm crooked, right? So I am trying to get used to wearing my mask more for longer periods of time because I know that when the kids return, I'm gonna have to wear them. I'm also planning on not wearing any makeup when the kids come back because if I have to wear this thing all day, oh, now I'm gonna try. But for now, so I just put the bracket inside of the mask like this. It kind of looks like an athletic cup to me, which is hilarious. And then I just put it on. I'm good to go and I like them a lot because one, they don't muffle me as bad and two, for some reason, my glasses don't fog as much as they did before. So anyway, I'm gonna get inside. I actually have a key fob that works now. It's so exciting. Like before we had to knock on the door and they'd let us in and now I have a key fob so I can just scan it and get into the building without having anyone open the door for me, which is so nice. Anyway, I'm gonna go in and get this day started. Dang it, my dreams are crushed. Not here yet. Okay, that's fine. So starting, I don't think it's next week. I don't even know what day of the week it is or month, day of the month. I'm like completely out of it. I think today's the 31st. So in two more weeks, starting September 14th, all staff is to report to school. We are to work from school and we are to begin our contracted hours as if students were here, which I love. I've been doing this the whole time, but you know, a lot of people have been staying home for various reasons, which I get, but it's not gonna be that big of an adjustment for me. So I'm hoping that our computer screens or our TV screens will be here before then because if we're starting to get ready for students, like that's kind of part of it. So I'm hoping that they'll have those installed before that. If not, I'm guessing that it'll happen before kids get here. So anyway, I just walked in the door, had a cute little chat with my office ladies. I love going up there because they're one of the only other staff members who are staying on campus during this time. And so it's just nice cause I see their faces every day and I try to make it a point to go down there at some point in my day. So I didn't take anything home with me over the weekend, which I love because then I can just focus on my son and my husband and it just makes life a lot easier. So I do have my little, my week planner here on my desk. If you watched my room tour, you saw it. And so I have quite a few things to do today. I have some phone calls I need to make, unfortunately for some kiddos who are not doing so hot, which I hate doing this, but it's part of the deal. And then I'm going to grade from last week. And then I'm going to begin planning for the next school week, which will be week eight of virtual learning. I'm going to try to drag out erosion as much as possible. And then when the kids come back, assess them here and then either continue with erosion or move on, but I really want to do like some demonstrations this week. So I think I'm going to dig into my cupboard here and see what science materials I have because I want to do like the plate tectonic thing where I move the land farms and create the mountains and then demonstrate rainfall, wind, rivers and all that stuff do like an erosion station lab thing and have the kids do like a scientific method moment. So make observations, make hypothesis, things like that. And then challenge them to do some of these demonstrations at home if they're able. And I also really want to do the earth spheres in a bag project, which I didn't do last week. So now that I have, next week is kind of going to be like, I want to make it a very fun, engaging week. Not that all my weeks are fun and engaging, but I feel like in the last two weeks with social studies it's been a little dry because studies weekly is a little dry, but I've been trying to just get the kids used to using the system because we are going to be using it, the heck? A bug bite just oozed on my arm. Because when we come back to school the kids are still going to be using computers a lot because of the paper issue. And it's just going to be a lot easier to track all of their stuff if it's on the computer. So that's why the last couple of weeks have been a little bit drier, which is fine. I mean, I've tried to find fun, engaging things for them to work on. But yeah, this week I'm going to focus on planning for science again. All right guys, so I did a little bit of digging and I didn't get anywhere because I decided to switch to a different project. I needed to create my near pod for this morning's Google Meet. So I did that first and then, so my team leader, we've decided as a team that we're going to begin doing weekly progress reports for our four hour at risk students. So any student who's scoring below 70% is going to be covered as an at risk student. So every week we have a Google form that has all of our classes. It's like a spreadsheet. So at the bottom we have each person's home room. And what we do is we put in the grade percentage and then we put comments next to the grade percentage. And then that way we only have to call our home room kids parents and be like, hey so-and-so is not doing so great in ELA and in math and this is why. So we can kind of explain to the parent why they're not doing so great. And then if the parent wants to follow up with the special area teacher, they can. This kind of makes it easier on each teacher because we don't have to call students who are not in our home room. So it gives us a smaller list of students that we need to call every day rather than, so let's say I have like 24 out of 78 students who are scoring 70% or sorry, lower than 70%. Instead of calling all of those 25 kids, I would only call my home room kids. So I only have to call seven kids instead of 25 kids or five kids instead of, you know what I mean? So it makes the call volume a little bit lower and then it also eliminates the, I guess, level of us picking at them. So instead of three phone calls from the school or three emails from teachers, the parent is only going to get one instead of feeling like we don't want to feel like we're bombarding them or harassing them about their kids' grades. We feel it's important to share their kids' grades in progress with them but we also don't want them to feel overwhelmed by, oh, I got three phone calls today because my child is failing three classes. Instead, it's just me calling and saying, hey, you know, they're not doing so great in math. They're not doing so great in social studies. ELA is good. Science is good. And then just kind of, you know, from there, you know, if you have any questions for Missy, go ahead and call her or email her and she'll be sure to update you on what everything is. So we've kind of decided to do this as a departmentalized grade level because it's a lot of teacher workload for me to call 25 parents when I could call, you know, five or six. So it's made it a little bit easier on us and so every Monday we update that list, moving forward and then throughout the week we call those parents and try to update them. So that's been working out really well and so have the late policy. I know in a couple of vlogs ago I talked about our late policy and so that's been really helping the kids be more accountable. A lot more kids are turning things in on time. Hey, good morning. Good, how are you? You too. And so that has been working out really well. So I have about 20 minutes until my first Google Meet so in about eight minutes I'll turn it on the timer and get that started. I'm gonna use the bathroom. I feel good that I ate my breakfast at home because now I'm not having to like worry about trying to get that finished while working, kind of nice. So I'm going to continue working on this project and then I'll use the bathroom and then get started with my first Google Meet. I did wanna show you guys my outfit of the day though because I know you love these. I'll probably put on Instagram too. But okay, so I'm wearing that black dress that I wore last week. It has like the tank top, kind of top-ish thing. But today I decided to put a t-shirt over it and I really like how it turned out it kinda looks like I'm wearing a long black skirt. And then these little cheetah print sandals which honestly guys, I would not recommend these. They're from like an Instagram ad and they took like four months to get to me so I'm not even gonna share where they're from because it would just cause you grief. This t-shirt is from Amazon, I believe. And then I'm also wearing my Kendra Scott necklace and my Buffalo Coin earrings and that's kinda it. You guys know I love the t-shirt dress kind of deal. So that's what I'm wearing today. All right friends, so I just finished my first Google Meet for the day and man, the chat thing is starting to become an issue. They all want to just like, blast the chat with stuff and I had to really nip it today. I had to tell a few of them if I see your name in the chat one more time and it's not a question for me, I'm going to have to ask you to leave the meet. It's starting to become like, they just want their name to be seen, they just want to be heard and I totally understand that, you know? But it is very distracting so that has been kind of an overall theme in the last couple of Google Meets. So that's kind of been an issue. If you guys missed my classroom tour, you missed out on this beautiful, flexi spot desk riser that I use for my Google Meets. One handed motion here. I'm gonna just drop it back down and get right back to work. Two o'clock and I just finished with my last Google Meeting and exhausted. I had to pour myself another cup of coffee. I'm trying to finish that right now before I leave. But man, I am not feeling it today, you guys. I don't know what it is, maybe I didn't get enough sleep, maybe I didn't have enough coffee. I don't know what it is, but I am not feeling it. So I'm gonna get going here. I'm gonna go home and do my office hours from there and try to just relax for a little bit. Yeah, just wasn't into it today. Lots of different things going on that are making it a hard day. Lots of students who are not doing so good. Tracking grades is very tough online because it's just more clicks where as grading in person, you just pick up a piece of paper and just kind of shift through them. That's really making me feel stressed and kind of out of it. I think maybe that's why I had a hard day because I did nothing but grading all day. And that's exhausting. So I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna do my office hours from there and then I'm going to go to the gym and try to work off some of the stress and see if I can get a boost of energy there. So I will see you guys in the next vlog. I hope that you enjoyed. And if you're not following me on Instagram, make sure you do that. But I hope you guys enjoyed today's video and this is real life. Virtual teaching is not the greatest and some days it's harder than others. So I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.