COVID-19 Homeschool, Day 49

We survived the big push to get the house ready for pictures, so now we're ready to get back to non-feral homeschool! Today should be a much more efficient day than we've had in a while (I hope). Since it's a short week with the Monday holiday plus what little we did yesterday, I'd like the kids to stick to the "core" subjects for today to make sure we don't get behind, and to make sure they've completed anything that should be done before their online class meetings tomorrow afternoon.

So let's get this show on the road!

8:30-9:15am: My son is watching a couple of engineering and science videos posted by his science teacher. He's definitely a STEM guy, so I try to get him to do as much science as possible. At his school, science is only a weekly subject (sadly), so we take advantage of extra science lessons whenever possible. My daughter got a bit of a late start this morning, but when she finally got going at about 8:45, we looked over her daily class assignments and started doing some catch-up work from yesterday. She started with a Greg Tang math game called "Coin Bubble" to practice 10 frames, then she's moving on to do 20 minutes of Zearn math. I'm always happy when she works on math, because that's not her strong suit. I'm staying nearby because she gets easily frustrated when she doesn't understand right away, so I like to try to talk her through figuring it out on her own before she melts down. I've found that one of the biggest difficulties of having smart kids is that when they don't immediately understand something or they're not able to solve a problem with minimal thinking, they get very frustrated. They need a lot of reminding that life doesn't work that way, and the reason we go to school is that nobody understands everything immediately and automatically. That's a harder lesson to learn than you might think. But learning it now will make their lives a lot less frustrating.

9:15-10am:  My daughter is doing one of the dreaded (by me more than her, at this point) FlipGrid math problems. Let's see how smoothly this goes. She got stuck at first because you can't fill in the responses on the screen, but once I got her paper and pencil, it helped. Like me, she tends to be a visual learner and thinker, so problems you solve in your mind are a struggle. Most of our math discussions are not the "nuts and bolts" type, but the "how to understand what the situation is and what they're asking" type. Word problems will always be her bane, but she's learning how to think through them. My son is working on some more logic-based math problems, including figuring out the most efficient placement of security cameras in a housing complex and some other "figure it out but also use math" problems. I like these real-world application math problems.

10-10:30am: Miss Tracey's Circle Time and Atlantic White Shark Conservancy Facebook Live programs, as usual. My daughter gets a quick break afterwards, since Circle Time is only about 15 minutes or so. I've started baking a couple of batches of bread, some for us and some to share with neighbors. I've done this "one-hour" recipe so many times now that it really does take me only an hour!

10:30-11:30am: I suggested that both kids do some independent reading on Epic, since most of our books are still packed away for the move. They didn't really get much of a chance to do any reading yesterday, so I'm encouraging them to read for at least 45 minutes and preferably a full hour - and they both went for pretty close to the full hour!

11:30am-1pm: Lunch break and free time.

1-1:30pm: My son is now taking a turn with Zearn math, and my daughter is starting with Mystery Doug and learning about what causes rainbows. After she finished watching the video, she went outside and sprayed the pool with the hose to make some rainbows of her own. It took a good bit of discussion and experimentation to convince her that she needed to have the sun behind her in order for it to work, but eventually she caught on.

1:30-2pm: My daughter worked on a collection of video logic problems (you have a key to a door; it's to the left of the red door, it's not the door with the #3 on it, etc., which door does your key open?). My son is working on a ReadWorks assignment on the topic of disease spreading.

And with that, we're all ready to jump into the pool to cool off! Have a great afternoon, everyone!