Kick off your school day right.
With the first three school days of this jarring new normal under our belts, parents everywhere are beginning to get a handle on what the months ahead will look like. Feelings are ranging from “we got this” to “teachers should be paid a billion dollars” to “OMG, school may not be back in session until August… or (gasp) August 2021!). It’s a lot.
Some schools are offering full distance learning services, with online classes for a true school day. Other schools are supplying assignments and materials for parents to facilitate. While others are just leaving it 100% up to the parents. Wherever your family falls in these, I still say: set a schedule.
It took a few days to get our groove on here, so I thought I’d share a few updates since the last schedule post. Once we learned what the teachers were providing for the kids, it altered the schedule a bit. Here’s where we stand now (and here’s a link if you want to use it as a template), with a few notes below:
MORNING MEETING
This is the start of our family’s day. By 8:45AM, our two boys have already played with lego, wrestled, run around and gotten wild, so this is our time to shift gears to the school day. What we cover:
Teacher’s messages: Any welcome notes or videos from their teachers. If you don’t have daily teacher’s notes, you can read a book or find a quote of the day together online.
Question of the day: We pose the question of the day asked by my son’s teacher. You can ask any question that will elicit answers and smiles from your kids (like “if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?”).
Daily schedule: We review the schedule for the day, which includes the kids writing their assignments for the day on a white board. This gives them some ownership of their day.
A little hard to read, but you get the idea.
Once completed, they proudly erase what they have accomplished.
Mindful minute: The last thing we do is a mindful minute. This did NOT go well the first few days. My bad. I didn’t put any thought or planning into it. I tried to start the whole “meeting” off with it. The kids were wriggly, not ready and annoyed.
I made some tweaks:
We now end the morning meeting with it, once everyone is settled in enough.
I remembered that my cousin has an amazing kids’ yoga program! So this morning we used this video from Kidding Around Yoga (thanks Haris!) and the kids were sad when it ended after two and a half minutes.
One more important note: start on time every day. If you veer from the schedule after that, no problem. Starting on time will help keep everyone on task and will send the message to the kids that you are taking this as seriously as you are asking them to.
Everyone’s situation is different. You can be as engaged as you can and want to be in your kids’ day. The important thing is to have the schedule there as a baseline. And then be flexible… knowing that this isn’t school. “Home” still comes first in homeschool.
Related posts:
Check out All Set Organizing in Redfin’s recent article on organizing a small kitchen.