End of week three of the kiddos being home. Completed Week ONE of distance learning with Lucius. Can I just say TEACHERS ARE AMAZING!!
A few take aways:
1) first day of distance learning my fourth grader figured out how to do the bare minimum on all the choice boards that were available so that he was “finished” with all his required tasks in like half an hour. Yup.
This is an assignment for Social/ Emotional lesson: "Write an encouraging note to a friend"
This is Lucius attending his first class zoom meeting. We had to facetime with his teacher before this meeting because he was so anxious and nervous to join this way- as he is about anything brand new. But once he's got it "over with" it was smooth sailing after that.
2) having to organize
everything that was sent home from school for my smaller humans and
remember what was what, was exhausting. Who had what zoom meeting and
when. Which device were they going to use and so on... super
overwhelming. Wanna see how we made it work? Check out our living room
wall covered in all the choice boards and schedules pictured below:
3) I quickly realized that if we were gonna make this work we were going to have to let some things from the daily choice boards go. We read a choose your own adventure book and now he is writing a book of his own. He’s spent hours on it so far and is thoroughly enjoying that writing project. We watched lego master builder, guess who’s playing with legos again?! (We’re counting that as a STEM project). We watched the kindness diaries documentary... my kids are learning about cultures, countries, and the human spirit like they’ve never seen or heard about before. Sometimes less really is more...
4) who ever decided to make chores a part of the students daily tasks is brilliant! We have finally got dishes into the dishwasher. People are sweeping, folding their own laundry and happily cleaning their own messes! Amazing.
So, to any fellow pandemic schooling parents, let the plans go if you need to, let the kids enjoy learning and take all the guilt out of the equation. Stress will still happen but seriously... it is what it is. If you can’t give it your best (I totally couldn’t this week), I like to think its all going to be okay. Somehow we survived... and that was with only one doing school this week. We’ll see how next week goes with two!
This is the neighbors and our kids social distance playing. They all did a great job, even though staying away from each other is so hard for them. They'd much rather be playing tag than staying 6 feet apart or more.
I promised Lucius a bike ride one afternoon after he was finished with his work. So we went around the lake and back home again. It was a nice trip.
The kiddos watching a video lesson from the art teacher.
Another weekly extended family facetime:
3) I quickly realized that if we were gonna make this work we were going to have to let some things from the daily choice boards go. We read a choose your own adventure book and now he is writing a book of his own. He’s spent hours on it so far and is thoroughly enjoying that writing project. We watched lego master builder, guess who’s playing with legos again?! (We’re counting that as a STEM project). We watched the kindness diaries documentary... my kids are learning about cultures, countries, and the human spirit like they’ve never seen or heard about before. Sometimes less really is more...
4) who ever decided to make chores a part of the students daily tasks is brilliant! We have finally got dishes into the dishwasher. People are sweeping, folding their own laundry and happily cleaning their own messes! Amazing.
So, to any fellow pandemic schooling parents, let the plans go if you need to, let the kids enjoy learning and take all the guilt out of the equation. Stress will still happen but seriously... it is what it is. If you can’t give it your best (I totally couldn’t this week), I like to think its all going to be okay. Somehow we survived... and that was with only one doing school this week. We’ll see how next week goes with two!
This is the neighbors and our kids social distance playing. They all did a great job, even though staying away from each other is so hard for them. They'd much rather be playing tag than staying 6 feet apart or more.
Another weekly extended family facetime:
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