The reality is beginning to sink in – most likely three or more weeks of homeschooling with almost all kid-friendly places closed. Email after email announcing closings all the places one might go to educate and entertain your child: Zoo, Botanical Gardens, Fernbank Museum, Children’s Museum, etc. Time to get creative and prepare for a lot of home-based activities.
Other than an a “Backpack” of online resources, the kids brought home a notebook, a couple workbooks, and some worksheets. Each of the kids’ teachers will be available for an online chat from 10-11am each day and accessible by email during the school day. The guidance from the Principal is that Kindergarteners should have one hour of online activities and 20 minutes reading a book; for fourth graders, it’s two hours online and 40-60 minutes of reading. There are teacher assignments, but it’s up to us – mostly working parents to figure the rest out. Welcome to pandemic parenting!
Here’s what I’ve been doing to prepare:
Setting up space:
Everyone needs their own workspace, including kids. So, each child now has their own designated table/desk – the two Kindergarteners in the living room and the fourth grader in his room. He set up an extra space on his table for one K sibling to join him for special sibling time (and tech assistance if needed).
Getting supplies and identifying resources
At the start of each school year, I always buy extra supplies for the house or the kids’ teachers when they start running out at the end of the school year. Yesterday, I dug them out to create home supply sets for each child. For daily art activities, I pulled out arts and crafts supplies. For STEM learning and a home “treasure chest” for rewards I raided my stash of Lego sets and other presents for birthday parties (that will not be happening for the forseeable future).
Establishing new house rules
For the new reality of every day all day mostly at home, new house rules are needed. Space has been purposed to maintain a reasonable amount of social distance in the house …. to keep the peace (thankfully, we’re all healthy). In setting up the new workspaces, I removed a lot of clutter and identified roles for each of the shared living spaces. The living room is now relaxing and reading on couches, puzzles and Lego play on the large coffee table, school workspaces on small tables and playrug for magnatiles. The kitchen table (near the door) if for my nearby workspace and to host any visitors – though we don’t have any plans for that. The back room is still a playroom including music, games, and large-screen media.
Other rules:
Anyone who is feeling cramped or becomes ill-tempered is quickly encouraged to head to the backyard for fresh air, some exercise (laps to the fence and back) and attitude adjustment. And, everyone understands that visits to neighbors, especially those next door who are surrogate grandparents to the kids, is now limited. Playdates have not been discussed, but the separate workspaces offer the opportunity for each child to host a classmate at some point.
Developing a daily (school) schedule
Key to my sanity and the kids feeling secure in this big shift is to create a school schedule at home – with even more fun activities. Tomorrow, I’ll post a daily schedule in the living room that loosely mirrors the school schedule and integrates the limited expectations from the kids’ teachers. Instead of weekly “specials”, art, music, Spanish, and PE will be daily. Art will include arts and crafts – and virtual tours of the major art museums around the world. Music will include piano, trumpet, ukelele and other instruments and free online opera performances by the Met and symphonies by the Berlin Symphony among other Cool Learning Resources (to be posted soon). Spanish will be a combination of Spanish language materials and Duolingo. PE will include scootering to neighborhood playgrounds, hiking in nearby urban forests, yoga practice, and the usual activities. Each child will have a chance to lead, and a chance to practice following the others, to share skills they know better and improve those more challenging. And unlike the one hour of carefully rationed recess time, we’ll try for at two-three hours of outdoor time per day.
Check out Khan Academy’s sample schedules for kids in different grade levels https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSZhOdEPAWjUQpqDkVAlJrFwxxZ9Sa6zGOq0CNRms6Z7DZNq-tQWS3OhuVCUbh_-P-WmksHAzbsrk9d/pub