Louby I’m glad your week has gone well. We are having regular phone calls with ‘my child/their sibling has a sniffle/runny nose can I bring them in? It’s made difficult particularly because different schools have different actions according to their risk assessments which makes things confusing.
Sunnyday, I’m sorry you had such a tough week but be kind to yourself. I know you will be doing a brilliant job in difficult circumstances. While I’ve never been packaway as such my last school was very small which meant that dinners were served and eaten in my room. I had to completely clear away every lunch and because it was rarely clean before the children came back in for afternoon school couldn’t set up propeller. It was really difficult and I feel for you but also give yourselves a break. I’ve come to see over the last few months in particular that children are usually just as happy with less than we would like to give them and the quality of the relationships you build with them will be what is really important.
Non-settlers are tough on everybody (I can’t remember what age you start from) but they will get there with some blips ( I have been lucky enough to have just one wobbly one in the mornings) then yesterday being Friday of the first full week I had half a dozen as they were tired.
There are a huge amount of adjustments to make and it takes time to get there and as someone said the other day many people are expecting us to be ‘normal) again and we just can’t. Our classrooms are not arranged in a way we like, we are all doing extra cleaning each day but the length of our school day is back to normal and the expectations for marking, provision and display plus all the other roles we have are still there.
Be kind to yourself. Step away from it a little this weekend, I am sure solutions to some of your niggles will come to you but also don’t feel bad for feeling despondent. You are making a huge adjustment it the nature of our job means that we have little time to reflect on it during the day and many people expect us to be permanently smiley! It will take time!
Apologies for the epic reply but I really don’t want you to feel bad.