COVID-19 Homeschool, Day 21

A quick calculations tells me that nearly 12% of my children's education this year has happened at home. Well, 12% of their official schooling hours, anyway. Out of the 180 days that they spend in school each year, 21 of them have been here, with me. That's...weird. But it's also okay. Because we're making it work.

We took the day off yesterday (we couldn't make it work), but we're all feeling refreshed and ready to hit the ground running today! Here's our schedule for the day:

7-8:30am: Get up, make and eat breakfast, clear dishes, get brushed and washed and dressed. We discovered that our homemade French bread makes fabulous French toast, so we may need to add baking bread to our afternoon schedule, since we plowed through about three-quarters of a loaf.

8:30-10am: Both kids signed on to their Google Classroom sites and are systematically going through the assignments their teachers have posted. I have left it up to each of them the order they want to do the work in; they can start with math, or literacy, or any of the "specials" like art, music, computer, and Challenge. My son found a new coding challenge from his computer teacher, so he is working on that, and my daughter is doing an engineering project requiring her to make something out of a paper towel tube. I'm happy to launch them and let them work on their own for a while, although they both keep calling me over so they can show me their updates at every stage of development. It's nice to see them so excited about their work. They both took a quick break before their 10:00 session.

10-11am: My daughter's art teacher is hosting a drawing class on Google Meet, so she's very excited to join that. My son usually watches the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy program at 10am. Today they're learning about Ocean Zones, and there is a density lab you can do at home, so we may work that into this afternoon's schedule. There are also a few worksheets for him to fill out, both during and after the presentation. I spend the time planning my dinner menu, catching up on emails, and sewing a few more masks.

11-11:30am: Both worked on math, on the Zearn website.

11:30am-1pm: Lunch break and free time. I woke up at 4 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I took a nap. It was great.

1-2pm: My daughter has a Google Meet with her class; my son has band rehearsal via Google Meet. It's a challenge finding two places in the house where they can both work without disturbing the other's meet, or their dad on a business call in the office, or me working on my own stuff (or completely goofing off because they're unsupervised). But we manage to make it work for the short time when we all overlap and need to be noisy. We have 2 pairs of headphones, one of which is my husband's for work, and the other which is my son's, but can't be used during band, because he needs to be able to hear himself. My husband ordered several other pairs for me and my daughter, but not surprisingly, they're backordered and haven't arrived yet. But we deal with it.

The official word from their school is that the kids should be spending 3.5 hours a day on school work, so I figure we're regularly getting in 4 hours (plus some sneaky evening educational discussions that they're not even aware are educational), which is over the required amount. So 2pm is a good ending time for us, and when the weather is nice, I'll send the kids outside to get some fresh air and exercise!

It's official: We've got our groove back.