Most of the time when people decide to homeschool there is lots of hours of preparation, decisions to be made and well thought out plans. This week we learned due to the coronavirus that our children would not be returning to school until next year (and we are a district that doesn’t get out until mid June!) and I have to be honest I had a little panic set in upon hearing that— which was the first time I’ve really felt uneasy about all of this.
We’ve been told to…
Stay home? I got this. Working from home I knew this wasn’t going to be an adjustment for me.
Don’t eat out? Great, lets save some money that we always say we are going to cut back on.
Sanitize everything and wash your hands all the time? Have you SEEN my stash? We’re good there too.
Don’t go around people. This is probably the hardest thing we’ve come across— I haven’t met a stranger and my kids live for playing with someone other than us all of the time- but we are committed to this because we believe it’s the best thing we can do.
And I was fine with doing work from home for two weeks, I mean.. you can do ANYTHING for two weeks right? But quickly those two weeks turned into months and I began to doubt myself. By last night I had picked myself up and began a plan… and that plan included a schedule! My life revolves around the never ending to do list, but it helps me stay focused— so why would my children who are coming from “specific things on certain days at the same time” be able to adapt to my “we get it done when it happens throughout the day” plan I THOUGHT we would stick to?? It actually was a lot more stress for me to be “stress free” — So here we are :)
I am not going to be rigid with “20 minutes for this, or scheduling a break here” — you can tell when you’re children are going to need to move around. For “science” today- it was literally reading a book about brains and halfway through I saw them fidgeting a little bit so we let our brains show us they could quickly respond to commands, “Skip! Jump! Touch your toes!” They loved it, and quickly were able to sit back down and we finished the “lesson”. — I’m not being too hard on myself here, we are literally at Day 1. Ground Zero. But… I didn’t hate it and i’m excited for tomorrow too.
I struggle a bit with worksheets without seeing the whole plan, so I did invest in some homeschool curriculum and I’m excited for that to arrive, but the school will continue to provide help as well— It’s just hard to print out SO many sheets— my printer is already screaming low ink when I just put a new one in last week! I’d rather buy a book! So we grabbed some things from The Good + Beautiful (highly recommended by most of my homeschool friends!), I found some workbooks and textbooks on Ebay, and believe it or not we have plenty of stuff here! If you’ve ever ordered educational books from Usborne.. you got this! :)
I am excited to see where this will go, and here’s a schedule that I created to help us to mark things off the list feel free to share it, and tag me on IG if you print it off! @meggarrison
