Homeschooling While Social Distancing
Even though we’ve homeschooled for years there is a difference between regular homeschooling and homeschooling when social distancing. Personally, I like to make sure we have an even balance of days at home and days out an about to be able to help out both my introvert and extrovert. So while we are used to having an entire day at home, we are not used to doing it for days on end.
I want to do a little post later this week on how life is different right now as a result of COVID-19 because I think that will be interesting to look back on years from now.
OUR HOMESCHOOL WEEK IN REVIEW
For reference, here’s the low down on the kids:
Raeca – she’s 9 and in grade 4
Ephraim – he’s 6 and in grade 1
R2D2 – he’s 18 months (he came to our family via foster care in February)
HERE’S OUR WEEK IN REVIEW:
+ Since our recent switch to unschooling I’ve been paying extra attention to all the learning opportunities that come up each day and I’m always blown away and wish I would have been able to make this switch long ago. One day Ephraim asked me the difference between continents and countries and while I’ve told him this before, it was always on my terms, now he was curious because of something he had heard so we went over to the map and I showed him the difference. When you are interested in a topic you can learn so much more and retain that knowledge.
+ Games are always a big part of our homeschool (you can see some of our favorites here) and with everything that is going on I thought it seemed fitting to play Pandemic: The Cure. We were unable to find the cure for all five diseases and therefore we lost and everyone in the world died. Good thing the real world isn’t counting on us to find the cure for COVID-19!
+ Raeca has been working on typing out a fantasy story, she’s been making notes about her different characters, what they look like, their interests, etc and then has been typing out chapter one.
+ Raeca is reading a couple of different books right now, including Rain Reign, she’s reading that one for the Read Your Bookshelf March challenge.
+ We also started a family game of Lord of The Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth. This one Jared and I usually play together without the kids but they wanted to do one together.
+ Rae and Ephraim have spent so much time playing together in the last week, it is such a blessing. They spent a lot of time playing with this DIY car mat with cars and Lego people that they created out of strips of the paper rolls from Ikea. They have also been playing hours and hours of Lego.
+ We spent a good amount of time watching some of Mark Rober’s videos, it started out with the germ one and then we just continued on. The elephant toothpaste one was one of the kids’ favorites. One thing I liked to point out to my kids as we watched his videos is how often he says “But first we need to go back six months/a year from now.” And show how long his videos take him to make and that it’s a good thing to be able to put a lot of work into a project.
+ We are still listening to the same audiobooks together as the week before.
And that’s just a brief look into our homeschool week!