Well, it seems that I have a little extra time on my hands…so I write!

I felt a lot of things yesterday when I looked around my classroom one last time before turning off the lights and locking the door.

I was sad. Sad that I won’t get to see my kids for three weeks–we’re a family, you know. Sad that I won’t be back in my home-away-from-home. I was uncertain. Wondering what kind of days were before the boys and myself as we tried our best to stay at home, away from crowds of people. I was contemplative. Already thinking up some kind of plan to keep doing some kind of school routine with the boys at home, because, you know, some teachers never stop…

I had just sent my classroom parents a schedule of what our school day looks like and how they can make their home day look similar if they wanted to. I thought to myself, You can do that with the boys.

Hmmm. My kindergarten schedule? With the boys, who are in 7th grade and 5th grade? They’d never go for that.

But my boys surprise me sometimes. I pitched the idea to them like this: “Hey guys, I worked on a schedule for some students and parents who wanted a daily routine while we were out.” A little chuckle from me, trying to seem nonchalant. “I thought, we could do it at home, and we could just insert your grade level into some of it, and you could do my kindergarten day with me and we could make it fifth grade and we could make it seventh grade and some of it might seem funny and some of it might seem–”

“Yeah! Let’s do that!” they said. Quickly.

“I think that’d be fun,” the seventh grader said.

“We’d get to talk a lot to you,” said the fifth grader.

My heart broke and grew at the same time. Since when did my boys think we don’t get to talk much at home? When did I become unavailable? I thought they were the ones who’d become unavailable?!?

So, here we are. They are currently in Reading Stations, which my kindergartners love. And I love. And–surprise–fifth and seventh grade boys love. I’m not jumping the gun here. I know this is day one. I know that tomorrow Fortnite could be calling their name and Facebook could be calling mine, and I don’t say that second part with pride.

But here we are. Working on Writing. To my kindergarten friends out there, my boys are loving Work on Writing as much as you do. I used your stories to inspire these boys to write today. The seventh grader said he wrote “like, a moral story.” The fifth grade wrote a piece titled “My Journey to a Rock.” He says it has a tiny bit of violence in it. Say what?

And I wrote this.

With my boys. We wrote together. My writing heart is happy, my teacher heart is ecstatic, but my mother heart is full. Completely, and utterly full.

All things DO work together for our good.

Tomorrow during Work on Writing, I just might share our schedule with you and let you know what worked and what didn’t!