Friends: Day 3 of COVID-19 home schooling went well academically, but the toughest part about today is that Travis misses his friends. It breaks my heart that our playgrounds are empty, that our children cannot play together, despite the importance of it. Who says we are turning into a virtual culture? It’s clearer to me than ever that kids need other kids physically. To that end, we made sure to do a Skype with a buddy from school. Travis’s teacher also sent a video of herself reading a book. These “face-to-face” interactions were crucial, and I hope you are all finding ways to do them. At one point he just crumpled into tears, missing his buddies, and I held him for a long time. I am sending virtual strength to all, and here was our day!
7: We slept in! Home school is exhausting.
7.30-9: Breakfast, get dressed, free play.
9-10: ELA. Today we read a favorite book (Ralph Tells a Story), and when it was finished we talked about who the characters were, specifically the main character versus secondary characters. Travis loved doing his Lexia games while I played a quick game with baby sis!
10-10.30: Recess and snack.
10.30-11: Math. After playing a “Number Squeeze” game online, we made a hands-on version.
Travis had so much fun drawing monster faces, which we then taped to straws to “squeeze” our way to each number, using the concepts of greater than and less then.
11-12: While baby sister napped, Travis and I made a batch of homemade playdough. This alone was great fun, and then we used the playdough to write his name.
He wanted to make all capital letters first to avoid curves, but then got a little more confident and tackled a few lower case letters.
12-1: Lunch/free play.
1-2: His special today would have been “Library,” so we sat down for a story (I made sure Veronika had a few tactile books to go through, beside us), then listened to two episodes of the Kids Ask Authors podcast.
Finally, we modified the StoryMarch concept here; we printed pictures of six of the word prompts and lined them up in various ways. Each time the pictures were in a different order, we made up a different story about them!
2-3: Frankly, Travis was exhausted this afternoon and I barely got him to focus. So instead of energetic physical movement, we did a “Chillax” video from GoNoodle. For science, we read a book about bugs, and watched a quick video about the first day of spring.
We capped off the day with a walk outside to take advantage of the nice weather, and looked for signs of spring. Travis was so proud when he spotted buds, or flowers coming up.
joyful parenting 