Just a glimpse

 of what we’re doing in class these COVID-y days.

Learning how to use Google Meet to… ummm… meet. Virtually. (We obviously need to review how to keep our masks OVER our noses very frequently, too!) They love using Google Meet. And, yes, we were talking about building things in Minecraft. I use it to teach.


We can no longer sit in our “Reading Circle” because it’s less than six feet apart. We decided to try sitting under our 6-feet-apart desks instead. Don’t worry. The teacher did NOT have to go sit under her desk. (She’d still be stuck under there!!)

Quotable Quote from Tyler: “Wow, all these words were so hard to sound out last year. I think my brain grew over the summer! They’re easy now!”

Good things come in Nike boxes… we opened my care package from Romy and were thrilled to discover tasty cookies! “Pidamaya ye” (thank you!) they said to Romy as I took this picture. 

Of course, you can’t see their lips… because they’re masked. Can you imagine the challenge of a deaf teacher dealing with masks all the time?!? I use an app on my phone called Live Transcribe. It’s a free Android(only) app that transcribes speech into captions live. It’s not perfect, but much better than trying to speech-read through masks!

These are four of my twelve math students this year. The others are out sick with either strep (2), COVID symptoms (4) or are learning online from home (2). The online from home kids miss out on the cookies!

The tall guy isn’t a math student. He’s one of the two Dakota Language teachers who come in periodically to translate to/from Dakota with my students and me. I pay him in cookies. Just kidding.