I may start to do these home school posts as weekly roundups, especially as it seems likely we’ll extend further into the school year. But for today at least, here was our second attempt at a Monday! There were some real challenges today, less about the schooling and more about a five-year-old’s emotions at missing friends, missing “real” gym and recess, and more. How are you faring? Please share in the comments!
7-9: Breakfast, get dressed, free play.
9: Check-in/ELA. I’m making sure to ask Travis how he’s feeling each morning, in addition to going over the weather and day of the week. When we started today’s literacy lessons, I could tell he was bored with sounding out words. What he really needed was to see his teacher, so we were glad to find another recorded read-aloud online. I could only get him to sit for a little Lexia. (Baby sister was busy, meanwhile, with Velcro).
10-10.30: Snack and recess. The kids got silly eating snack, which was a lighthearted moment. It’s cold and snowy so we weren’t outside long, but did fetch a few sticks because we needed them later for arts and crafts…
10.30-11: Math. I had him count out peanut butter puff cereal in 3 ways. First just counting the total, then arranging them in a circle, then in 4 groups of 10.
Little sister helped herself to a snack on occasion, so I kept extras at the ready. High fives all around!
We also did 1 fun page from How High Can a Dinosaur Count.
11-11.30: Arts and crafts: Using our sticks from recess, Travis made tissue paper flowers. He twisted big pieces of colorful tissue into “flowers”; they ended up looking like calla lilies!
11.30-12.30: Gym: He would have had P.E. as the special today. One suggestion was to throw snowballs, but despite the wintry weather, there wasn’t that much snow on the ground. So we made some! This indoor mommy-son snowball fight was the highlight of the day. Next I encouraged him to try an exercise tabata, but this, on the other hand, led to tears and complaints about how home wasn’t the real gym. So we called it quits for…
12.30-1.30: Lunch/free play.
1.30-2: Social Studies. It was hard to get him to focus after lunch. We tried a suggested social studies unit on being a good citizen from pebblego.com, but missing classmates made him angry.
I felt like I was failing. Yes, I can provide my son with literacy and math skills here at home, but I’m also very aware of how far short I fall from replicating a classroom environment for social learning. We tried out a Spanish song and a Kidzbop dance to change his headspace, but those didn’t help much…
2.30:3: Science. Luckily, a little science did! I decided we needed something more hands on so we made an outer space parachute. We finished the afternoon with a board game. By this point he was really tired, but I pushed him to play a round of Silly Sentences, which is wonderful for teaching parts of speech. Soon he was roaring with laughter for “shiny squirrels singing” and “scary sandwiches breaking”. So much so he wanted to play a second round!
Just before bed, we watched an online read of I Am Peace, a suggestion from his school counselor to help kids with mindfulness in this trying time. We needed this one tonight, gulp. We’ll jump in again tomorrow.
Cut a square from a plastic shopping bag, and then use a hole punch to make a hole in each of the four corners (you may need to rip the bag a little bit, too, to help the hole punch through).
joyful parenting 