back to school : returning to in-person learning,

After some nine hundred days of home-ness (and two years of virtual learning, beyond the half-year of virtual flailing Rose's class did after initial lockdown), our young lades have returned to in-person schooling once more. What might it be like? Aoife managed both years of kindergarten online, and Rose went through grades two and three, all of which went far better than we might have imagined, honestly (see my variety of reports, including our recent summer stretch, in reverse order, here, here and here). By their second year into such, the virtual teachers had a pretty good idea of what they were doing, as did our young ladies. They didn't require nearly as much attention (although Rose still required an assist with homework). And Rose was provided far more support through the virtual space than she might have been offered had she been in-person.

We've sent Aoife over to where Rose had been, the school some four hundred metres from our front door, but Rose is off to another school entirely, hoping that she can spend grades four through six collecting some tools to help her progress, before potentially returning her to the public system (and both children in the same school at the same time, finally) for grade seven. Did I mention that Rose's drop-off is 8am with a twenty minute drive? And Aoife an 8:55am drop-off. Pick-up is near-simultaneous, so we've yet to figure out the logistics of that one (a perfect world would allow for the same person to collect both children, but we aren't quite there yet). We're still masking in public, so we're hoping our young ladies might be masking their school-days as well, which has gone mostly well so far.

And of course, the return of in-person school means, naturally, the return of the sick-days (we've already had Aoife home briefly due to a cough and runny nose, although repeat negative Covid tests; and Rose was home yesterday with a sore throat). Might the snow days return as well?