02 April 2020

Recent Homeschool Happenings.

School is out for the forseeable future.  I don't believe anything they're telling us at this point.  At first, notices read something like, "YES! We're coming right back after spring break!"...and then... well, the school will do online learning for a week and THEN have all the germy kids back within inches of one another... and then... well, now they say school will begin at the end of the month!  Nope, I don't believe them.  Even today, I got a "Senior Parent Note" telling me that sure, Prom is just gonna be pushed back a month.  I wish they'd stop jerking these kids around and just close the school for the year already. 

Anyyyway.  The title of the post is "Recent Homeschool Happenings," so here we go:

Previously, the children would pop up at six, get the bus by seven, come home at 11 and then have lunch and do schoolwork or go skating or whatever because they homeschool half days.  Right now, we're on stay at home type orders and my two college students are back home all day as well as my high school senior.  My husband is also working from home downstairs. It's just more crowded and we're working out ways not to get on one another's nerves.  Maintaining at least a good framework of a schedule is key to doing this!

Now, we get up around 7 or 7:30, have breakfast and start public school stuff on the computer around 8.  It's a joke, really.  Woodjie and Rose are popping 'round looking for more stuff to do well before 11 when we have lunch.  I don't fault the school for just assigning a bit of busywork and calling it good enough.  So many families have NOT been homeschooling for years on end and this is a huge change for them.  The school seems to aim to make the work simple and ease that transition to staying at home all day.  Some families are losing jobs, working from home, and just plain old stressed out.  Simple is just fine for now.  If this continues through next fall, I'll have to consider homeschooling full-time as I want my children consistently learning as much as they can.  A little break for now - I'll allow that.

By chance, this is what I had my sixth-grader Rose begin reading last year.  How apropos.

Everyone finishes lunch at a slightly different time (Rose is a very slow eater and Woodjie is known to eat quite a fair bit!).  After about a 15 minute break that the children think is only 10 minutes, I call them back down to the dining room table to read Kindle books aloud for 20 minutes each or do a history lesson.  We'll work on something less intense such as playing chesskid.com or watching Horrible Histories on Amazon Prime for a bit.  Then back to the Kindle book or history lesson.  Occasionally I'll pop some science in, but at this point in the year I have done all of my "required" hours by law and so I've sorta sluffed off on that.

Things have changed so much and the children can't see their friends or go skating or do the things they used to for the most part.  So we're taking things a bit easy for the rest of the school year.  We have gone to the park and walked about the trails.  Some other visit, I will bring our Missouri Bird or Missouri Tree identification books and we'll find black walnuts and chickadees and so on.

3 comments:

  1. Even a little learning is better than none, although your kids seem to be so far ahead, this is a holiday for them. I agree the schools should just close, but maybe not for the rest of the year, and now I suddenly remember your year ends sooner than ours, so maybe closing until year end is a better option for you.

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    1. Here the schools close in mid-May, so having prom and all that after school should have already closed is just weird and likely not even going to happen anyway. Even Trump doesn't sound that optimistic about that "open for business at Easter" stuff any more. I guess I'm more a "do it or don't" person and there is so much MAYBE out there I am going absolutely nuts. I hope you are staying safe and healthy!!

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  2. I was SO RELIEVED I didn't have to homeschool ANYONE! They are all out of school. If this pandemic had happened when I had 6 kids at home I think I would have lost my mind! lol I can't get over how big your kids are now!

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