COVID-19 Homeschool, Day 51

TGIF! We've nearly made it through another week! As usual, we'll spending Friday looking over the week's assignments and making sure we haven't missed anything. We're losing our motivation a little, despite the short week, so once the most important assignments are done we may move on to something more fun, like a science experiment or a baking project. We'll play it by ear.

7-8:30am: Get up get dressed, bake cinnamon rolls, eat them, scrub frosting off of everything, brush hair and teeth.

8:30-9am: My son is working on a research assignment for his Challenge program, involving taking notes and putting them in outline form. I love that he is learning these organizational skills early. He loves to research and discover new information but he tends to just toss it out haphazardly, so it will serve him well to learn to both think through it and present it in a logical, orderly fashion. We hit a HUGE frustration point when the formatting of his Table of Contents kept getting messed up (I can sympathize; I have dealt with this all the time in the past). I tried to convince him to not worry about it and just get the information down on the page and we could format it afterwards, but he couldn't work that way, so I got into the document and formatted it for him, so now he's able to add his information points. Phew, crisis averted. My daughter is working on her Zearn math and also Math Playground. Added degree of difficulty: they're both working at the kitchen table and my daughter has no brain-to-mouth filter so needs to both talk out loud to herself while she works and to add commentary to her brother's questions about his work. I'm torn between wanting to separate them so they get their work done or leave them together so they can practice "real" classroom behavior. For now, I'm leaving them together.

9-9:30am: My son is continuing to fill out his Table of Contents, and my daughter has moved on to reading with Epic. I have retired to the porch to watch both the hummingbirds and the neighbor's new couch being delivered, as well as to get some kind-of-alone time. My introversion is kicking in a little more than usual today. Once my son finished and submitted his Table of Contents, I let him take a quick stretch break, then he chose to continue with a couple of virtual tours of Fenway Park and a lesson on the history of baseball.

9:30-10am: My daughter is working on her favorite, Typing Club, which is a very short assignment. My son reviewed his assignments for the week and he's finished everything. So I told them we can bake anything they want (within reason). They're both surfing around looking for recipes, and trying to agree on one. They debating a number of options, including chocolate chip cake, snickerdoodle muffins, and sugar cookies. They're also checking carefully to be sure we have all the required ingredients.

10-10:30am: We remembered a chapter in one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books where the family made popcorn balls, so we decided to search for a good recipe for those. We finally agreed on this recipe for Old-Fashioned Popcorn Balls! I had forgotten how long it takes to bring sugar to the hard ball stage, so after the kids had combined the ingredients and taken turns stirring for a while, I let my daughter take a break while my son went to get set up for his trombone lesson.

 

10:30-11am: My daughter is continuing her break (she actually writing an animated skit, so it's schoolwork, but she doesn't need to know that), and my son is logging on to his online trombone lesson. I am finishing boiling the sugar syrup and moving on to forming the popcorn balls. I'm not sure if I didn't let the syrup cool for long enough or if I didn't get it quite up to temperature (we don't have a candy thermometer so I used the "dropping a bit into cold water" technique, which has always been less than successful for me), but the popcorn "balls" are more popcorn "blobs," or possibly simply caramel popcorn. Eh, there's popcorn and there's sugar, the kids will be happy.

11-11:45am: My son is moving over to his online Challenge class, and my daughter is working on her FlipGrid math problem.

11:45am-1pm: Lunch break and free time! We enjoyed the popcorn balls as "lunch dessert."

1-2pm: We're watching a British series called "History 101." The first episode focuses on the history of fast food. It's really interesting! It's more of a lesson on nutrition and marketing than history, but it's still worthwhile learning. We went on to watch a second episode about the Space Race, which was also interesting, and much more science- and history-based. Good stuff! We'll be watching more episodes of this series next week.

And that's it for today, and for this week. Have a great weekend, everyone!