Homeschooling

Like much of America, we are hunkered down to help prevent the spread of Coronavirus. Little Man's baseball season is canceled. Sweet Pea's gymnastics gym is closed. The girls' production of Frozen Jr is rescheduled for next fall. The Daddy Daughter Dance is canceled (for the third time! Tornado, snow, and now ... pandemic). Our kitchen renovation is postponed. And, most dramatic of all -- school is canceled.

So here we are, in a situation I swore I'd never be in: I'm homeschooling my kids.

So far, we're doing okay. We came up with a daily schedule:

In addition to this (rather loose) structure, we are sticking to normal as much as possible. Even though we don't leave the house, we get up and get dressed every day. The girls do their hair. Everyone makes their beds in the morning, and helps straighten the house before each new activity (because this mama would go completely insane if the house was a mess on top of everything else!).

Our school distributed laptops or tablets to each student for virtual learning, and they are pre-loaded with a variety of literacy and math programs. Bonus: the kids don't get a ton of screen time normally at home, so this is VERY EXCITING.

But like I've told them, almost anything can be educational. Playing a game of Scrabble? Literacy. Building with Legos? Engineering. Cooking? Math (it's all fractions!).

Plus, the school is putting lessons online, even from the P.E. and Spanish teachers.

I saw something yesterday that made me smile: "Our grandparents were called to go to war. We're being called to sit on the couch." True! We can do this.