I will admit, life is HARD right now for most homeschoolers. While we are not new to homeschooling we ARE new to never leaving the house. If you are NEW to "homeschooling" and your children were in public school before covid 19, let me assure you this is NOT what homeschooling typically looks like!!!
In most cases homeschoolers live active lives. Normally our kids would be in dance class once per week, go to church choir once per week, go to American Heritage Girls another day of the week, we would go to the zoo/library/children's museum/science museum, or other such things during the week. Our area, as of May 30th, still not opened up. Libraries and churches are still closed. Schools are closed. At our local Home Depot people line up outside and no one goes in, until someone comes out. Most state parks and beaches are still closed as well. All our kids dentists and doctors appointments were canceled due to covid 19, museums and zoos are closed, and classes like dance are canceled as well.
Right before covid we decided to give public school a try. The kids went for two weeks before covid 19 hit. Over the last few weeks we have seen several schools who are talking about social distancing at school. For our kids, the whole purpose of going is the social aspect. If they are going to be having playgrounds closed, if they make kids sit 6 feet apart, and eat in their classroom, we will be homeschooling again in the fall. There is no way kids should spend all day in one spot and not be able to run and play outside during the day.
Our kids are doing amazingly well handling being stuck at home all the time. We are trying to make things as fun as we can, but where we live we get a lot of rain and we are still only in the low 60s, so with rain and cool temperatures it makes playing outside not something we can do daily.
We are thankfully staying healthy and staying home.
Of course there are some challenges. My husband is working from home during covid 19. That in itself would not be a problem however when you have a small house and sound travels VERY easily and you have young children and two dogs in the house, it is sometimes hard to focus and get all your work done. All in all we are doing well. We are enjoying being able to be together, we are thankful that my husband is still working, we are blessed to be healthy.
Highlights during this time have been their aunt uploading some videos to youtube so they could do work outs with their aunt, listen to her reading stories, watch a video she made about dog care, video chatting friends and family, and just being together as a family.
So what are we working on?
In most cases homeschoolers live active lives. Normally our kids would be in dance class once per week, go to church choir once per week, go to American Heritage Girls another day of the week, we would go to the zoo/library/children's museum/science museum, or other such things during the week. Our area, as of May 30th, still not opened up. Libraries and churches are still closed. Schools are closed. At our local Home Depot people line up outside and no one goes in, until someone comes out. Most state parks and beaches are still closed as well. All our kids dentists and doctors appointments were canceled due to covid 19, museums and zoos are closed, and classes like dance are canceled as well.
Right before covid we decided to give public school a try. The kids went for two weeks before covid 19 hit. Over the last few weeks we have seen several schools who are talking about social distancing at school. For our kids, the whole purpose of going is the social aspect. If they are going to be having playgrounds closed, if they make kids sit 6 feet apart, and eat in their classroom, we will be homeschooling again in the fall. There is no way kids should spend all day in one spot and not be able to run and play outside during the day.
Our kids are doing amazingly well handling being stuck at home all the time. We are trying to make things as fun as we can, but where we live we get a lot of rain and we are still only in the low 60s, so with rain and cool temperatures it makes playing outside not something we can do daily.
We are thankfully staying healthy and staying home.
Of course there are some challenges. My husband is working from home during covid 19. That in itself would not be a problem however when you have a small house and sound travels VERY easily and you have young children and two dogs in the house, it is sometimes hard to focus and get all your work done. All in all we are doing well. We are enjoying being able to be together, we are thankful that my husband is still working, we are blessed to be healthy.
Highlights during this time have been their aunt uploading some videos to youtube so they could do work outs with their aunt, listen to her reading stories, watch a video she made about dog care, video chatting friends and family, and just being together as a family.
So what are we working on?
Zoom reading groups
helping daddy build and saw
Our kids love helping when they see daddy building and making things. He is currently working on making a triple bunkbed and a wardrobe.
Our kids love helping when they see daddy building and making things. He is currently working on making a triple bunkbed and a wardrobe.
Working on puzzles
Puzzles are good for helping develop skills such as shape recognition, concentration, patience and a sense of accomplishment. They also help develop hand-eye co-ordination and fine motor skills.
Sometimes you have to change things up a bit and leave the pencil and paper for another day and instead work on other skills. We got the games below from Purposeful Play.
We worked on matching (The pony tails on your finger need to match the card. This works on fine motor skills as long as visual processing)
Sorting animals into farm or zoo animals. Some of these were tricky as our kids have never been to a farm, and our zoo has a petting zoo with farm animals on it. This lead to a great discussion about farms and what animals live on the farm, which ones live at the zoo, and where their native habitat was before they lived at the zoo.
Say it, spell it, write it.
You find a spelling word, use the letters to build it with capital letters, then write it with lower case letters. This helps build awareness of upper and lower case letters. It also lead to a discussion of why we want to write it in lower case rather than upper case. (Unless it is a proper noun or the first word of a sentence we do not use capital letters)
You find a spelling word, use the letters to build it with capital letters, then write it with lower case letters. This helps build awareness of upper and lower case letters. It also lead to a discussion of why we want to write it in lower case rather than upper case. (Unless it is a proper noun or the first word of a sentence we do not use capital letters)
This cute tray helps build three letter words.
He would pick a word card, and then find the letters to spell it out. All the words were three letter words so they fit perfectly in the little tray.
He would pick a word card, and then find the letters to spell it out. All the words were three letter words so they fit perfectly in the little tray.
These little ponytail cards worked a lot of skills. Visual processing (did you use the correct hand/did you put the colors in the correct order) and fine motor skills.
We also worked on one to one correspondence with the little cupcake cards and button sprinkles.
We got a table tennis trainer to help with hand eye coordination and vision processing
working on pumping
She drew a pirate kitty
Zoom writing group
more puzzle work
For arts and crafts we made Forky from Toy Story 4
building with blocks
Cooking - making her own scrambled eggs
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