900 Days of School: Special Images for the 2019-2020 School Year

“The soul is healed by being with children.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

A week and a half ago I finished my thirty-third year teaching elementary school.  To say that this was an unusual year would be quite an understatement.  Friday, March 13, we left the

classroom for the last time.  I am not a superstitious person, but that is one Friday the 13th I will always remember.

Educators learned quickly to reinvent how instruction would be delivered.  At a frantic pace, we learned how to use Zoom to meet with our students daily, learned programs to help collect their completed schoolwork, and discovered best ways to meet the needs of our families from our homes.  During those final  months of school, my students “entered” my home daily and I “entered” their homes.

The end of this  school year was an experience I will never forget.  I will cherish the positive things from those days.  During our last Zoom meeting, I had to fight back tears as I looked at those little faces one final time as my students.

Many of you know that I started a personal photography project three years ago.  In this project, I am capturing the final years of my teaching career.  This project has taken on a life of its own from the beginning.  This year, I promised my students that I would create a special image for each of them during this school year.

Prior to March 13, I completed only two of these special images.  It was my intent to have a theme from a work of children’s literature for each image.  Here are the images I created before we had to leave our campus for the remainder of the school  year.

Little Red Riding Hood was eager to show the image to her parents, so she made her own copy.

Once we started our remote teaching/learning experience,  I had a real problem in fulfilling my promise to create a special picture for each child.

I hope you will visit my blog this coming week in order to see how I solved that problem in order to keep my promise.

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