Fauquier County, Virginia is a beautiful and unusual area. The northern parts sits in the Blue Ridge Mountains while the southern ends is mostly flat. It’s a beautiful area that offers a little bit of everything for the outdoors-man and the smaller city lover. Three seasons a year it’s wonderful. Beautiful Spring weather, hot summers and watching the leaves change on the mountains in the fall while you are at recess. However come winter, this is where we are well known. Typically it’s the first county to post a closing or delay and the last to return to school. Once you understand the make up of our 651 square miles it makes much more sense. There are plenty of days where the northern ends receives 6 inches of snow while there are 2 inches in the south.

So what’s a teacher in this situation to do. Missing 17 days of school last year certainly tested the organization skills, enthusiasm and creativity of the classroom leaders. It can easily be considered an educator’s obstacle in meeting the state curriculum requirements

How do you continue to move forward with your curriculum when the students aren’t in school? Is it fair to assign “snow day packets” and give them grades? How do you create assignments when you aren’t sure when you’ll be back in school? Maybe this idea needs to be looked at from a different point of view. Since you can’t teach new information when you aren’t here, it’s time to use the tools available to you to create a “Snow Day Lessons”. Below are some options to use for those “Snow Day Lessons”:

• create a content folder in your LMS or class website that houses current and previous skills-remember all those skills the students had a hard time with but need more help-locate websites to review them (Weebly is a favorite)
• in your LMS, create a discussion board where students must respond to a thread on a historical or scientific topic
• assign websites such as Scholastic Story Starters and have the students email or submit to your LMS their writing assignment
• begin a Kidblog where students only need to keep an online journal of their snow days and must complete their entry with a question that other students can respond to
• using smartphones, have them create a video based on a certain topic-examples: Math-use a water bottle and color the water with food coloring and write computation problems in the snow