COVID-19 Homeschool, Day 27

My daughter is feeling a bit under the weather - her tummy was hurting a bit last night and again this morning. (The fact that she ate approximately 283 jelly beans yesterday may be a contributing factor.) So she's having a light day today, while I focus a little more on my son. Here's what today looked like:

7-7:30am: Last night, my son had requested something "different" for breakfast, so I gave him a list of options and he chose red velvet pancakes. (I included the recipe in this blog post.) It was a pretty big recipe, so we figured out the measurements to make half (MATH!!), and I measured the ingredients while he followed the directions and mixed the batter. I fried up the cakes and made up an icing recipe, since I don't have any cream cheese in the house to make the "real" icing. It came out pretty good, if a little chocolatey-er than he expected.

7:30-8:30am: Eat breakfast, clean up breakfast dishes, get dressed, brushed and washed.

8:30-9am: I took advantage of having only one child to deal with, and we sat together and reviewed everything on his Google Classroom pages for this week to see what was still outstanding. Our to-do list includes: review a chapter he read on the American Revolution and answer some online questions; write a paragraph about "What I Miss About School;" and work on a webpage with activities and quizzes about the Northeast Region of the U.S.

9-10:15am: He started by re-reading the American Revolution chapter and working on the questions. It was a little more involved than either of us anticipated. He took a 15-minute break in the middle, and still wasn't completely finished by 10;15, so he requested moving on to a different assignment and coming back to this one.

10:15-10:45am: He chose to read more of his Robin Hood book. I love this book for him because it uses rather archaic language that frequently requires context clues to figure things out, and he occasionally even has to look up a word he doesn't understand. Since he's an excellent reader, I appreciate that this type of book provides him with a challenge. I had my daughter read some more of "On the Banks of Plum Creek" while he was reading.

10:45-11:30am: I looked back over my son's American Revolution questions. He had actually done very little, so I sat with him and supervised while he wrote his answers. Amazingly, he was much more efficient when I was right there. I also had him think through his answers and answer verbally before he started writing anything, which seems to really help him organize his thoughts. But there's a lot more to do on this assignment. We'll be working more on it tomorrow. I think he could use a break from it today.

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

1-1:30pm: While my daughter participated in her Google Classroom meeting, my son and I went through some of the quizzes about the Northeast Region. They were pretty easy and we whipped through them in just a few minutes, so I let him choose a FlipGrid science experiment from the website. He found one that was similar to our density experiment from a few days ago: find an object that sinks in water, then add something to the water that allows the object to float. He dissolved a bunch of sugar in a glass of hot water, then looked for an object that would sink in plain water but float in the slightly denser sugar water. We tried with a plastic thimble first, but that was tricky because you have to push it down so it fills with water, but then we tried a broken crayon (the whole crayon didn't fit in the glass), and it worked like a charm - until we tried it on camera, then it sunk. A little more slowly than it did in the plain water, but it still sunk. So he added more sugar to the sugar water and tried again. Success!!

Since a) he was having a kind of a tough day, and b) he started early by helping with breakfast, I let him be done a little early. This was not one of our more effective or efficient days, and that's okay. Some days are like that, especially now. I don't think parents, teachers, or students should be concerned when days like that happen, unless they're becoming more and more frequent. But an occasional off day, or a day with a bad attitude, or a day where a kid just struggles to focus? That's just par for the course with everything that's going on in our kids' lives right now. And in ours. Let's all just cut ourselves some slack.

Take care of yourselves, people. Schoolwork is important, but in the big picture, don't sweat the little day-to-day stuff. Keeping your mind healthy is more important than schoolwork. Do what you need to do to make that happen, and don't be afraid to ask for help or to let other things slide when you need to. Be good to yourself. And to your little people. And to your big people, too.