Tuesday 24 March (Schools out for COVID19 - Day 2)
So the stress of being in lock-down, coupled with the innate ability that my children have to ignore instructions has meant that I am constantly reminding myself to take 3 deep breaths and realise we are all being asked to live outside of our comfort zones.
My kids are awesome, but they are clearly scared, and I do need to keep reminding myself of this. They pick up on everything, but due to their ages, being able to deal with the reality of what is happening is not a walk in the park. I am going to make it my mission to try and put myself in their shoes before I tell them off for their behaviour.
My parents who both fall into the vulnerable group have finally managed to get on an aeroplane back from South Africa. This is good news, but it has meant trying to get provisions to their house and get them a car to the airport (so that they can drive themselves home), while traipsing my kids around with me - not much fun for anyone!
Once we had finally finished all our work, we took advantage of the beautiful spring weather we are enjoying at the moment (long may it last). Playing in the garden, and painting things we could see in the garden. Unfortunately mummy and daddy left the kids to paint a bit on their own while we did some of our own work. It soon became apparent that this was a mistake! The kids decided it would be a good idea to paint themselves, and then go inside! Needless to say some of the doors and walls in our house have been redecorated in colours that are not of our choosing!
We wait with baited breath to see what Wednesday brings...
Please keep your distance and keep safe.
Monday 23 March (Schools out for COVID19 - Day 1)
Well last week was interesting!! Following the governments announcement that they were going to close school, Joshua (my 7 year old (Y3)) and I decided to get all the useful links that would help us to make home schooling fun. We built this website (well daddy built it under Josh's direction) on Thursday evening. Josh thought it would be helpful to others and so we shared it with a couple of classes from Hoebridge School, and a few family friends dotted around The UK. It seems he was right, so far we have had nearly 2000 unique users, and a lot of positive comments and suggestions from many of you. Thanks for all the support.
Today we started our home schooling with much short lived excitement!!Olivia (our 5 year old (YR1)) was determined to have registration, luckily both our children were present, so we had a great start with 100% attendance. I have never seen the kids so keen to learn, but the penny dropped when they actually had to sit down and do some of the (rather lage pile) work thay have been set by school. Anyway with much perseverance (and a few crocodile tears) we got there in the end. Unfortunatly the homework portal that our school (and clearly a plethora of other schools) is using had a few teething issues with the huge increase in traffic (hardly surprising) crashed, so we had to delay uploading the homework (fortunatly this was fixed quite promptly, and we uploaded the homework on time).Once our homework for the day had been completed, we did a bit of mental maths. Josh tried to improve his 7 times tables playing Daily 10, while Olivia did number bonds using Hit the Button. Both kids really enjoyed these games, and tried really hard to better their score each time (looks like these may become daily games...) who said learning couldn't be fun.
We spent a couple of hours enjoying the lovely spring weather, looking for mini beasts, and getting some fresh air. I can see the rest of this term being a learning curve for everyone, but I have faith that we will get there in the end. One thing I have gained today is a huge amount of respect for teachers, so thank you to all you teachers out there, you are superheroes with patience!!!