It was only a month ago or so that I wrote about our daily homeschool routine with a 5th grader and a 2nd grader. Fast-forward to spring, and we are in our 4th week of what I call crisis-schooling. Even though the school closures don’t affect us, social distancing has definitely turned our lives upside down. Here’s a look at our new homeschool routine during the pandemic.
It All Still Starts with Breakfast
We still kick off our day with a book and breakfast. I choose one of our read-aloud chapter books to read to my kids while they eat. I’m reading longer than I normally do because we don’t have to rush to get our day started so that we can finish in time for evening sports and activities. This alone is a huge change!
I don’t like to rely on our library for our scheduled books because I’m just not that organized. I’m so thankful right now that we own the books we’ll need to finish our school year. Our libraries have been closed for 4 weeks, and it looks like they’ll be closed for at least another month. However, I have put quite a few audiobooks on hold, so we won’t have a shortage of books during this time. We are reading more and the thought of running out of books is frightening!
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The Academics
This is everything that most people think of when they talk about school. For us as homeschoolers, this is just the basics – history, science, math, and language arts. Since this is our 6th year homeschooling, our rhythm and flow with these topics is pretty dialed in. Nothing much has changed except we are making a push to finish our school year early. Once we are free to leave the house as we wish (gosh, that sounds weird!), I want to dive right into play dates, park days, hiking trips, camping, and anything else that takes us on fun adventures with our family and friends. I don’t want the “need” to finish the curriculum to get in our way.
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The “Extra” Fun Stuff
As good as our intentions are with music, art, games, coding, foreign language, and other extras at the beginning of the year, these sometimes get left out of our routine once our out-of-the-house activities kick into high gear. This year was especially busy because we tried to split our time between two different homeschool groups. Both offered different activities that are important to us, and we couldn’t decide between the two. This has probably been our worst year yet in terms of following through with our intentions with music and art. Now that all of our activities have been canceled, we’re taking the time to dive back into these extras.
Meal Planning
I’m normally VERY organized about meal planning and grocery shopping. I’ve been using Plan to Eat for more than 7 years now, and it’s extremely rare for me to head to a grocery store without my plan and grocery list ready to go. However, we started to panic about all the people panicking!
There were a few mornings when we woke up to some new CDC or WHO announcement which caused us to take a very quick inventory of our food and head to the store before the masses heard the news and cleared the shelves even more. We didn’t stock pile, but we just wanted to be sure we had enough to get us through the week. A few of those announcements came on days that would have been shopping days for us, so we were running pretty low on food anyway.
After two weeks of shopping like this, I gave up and told my kids to make a meal plan out of whatever they could find in our house. They LOVED this idea! Even though we had plenty of real food (ie. ingredients), they had fun making us eat their favorites (hotdogs, pizza etc). Even though the grocery store shelves weren’t completely cleared, we did end up buying more junk food than normal just in case our usual ingredients became hard to find. Fortunately, things have calmed down a bit (both at home and at the stores), and I’ve regained control of our meal plan and grocery list.
My girls getting starting their flower garden for the season.
Family Time Outside
This is prime gardening season, so we’re working on getting everything weeded and planted. The girls and I went shopping for their flower garden right before our Governor issued stay-at-home orders, so they got to plant their flowers and seeds. This pandemic has also brought to light the importance of growing food. It has shed a different light on how I plan my vegetable garden. I’m trying to be more efficient about what and how much I plant.
We’ve also been spending a lot of time outside as a family taking walks around the neighborhood and playing in our yard. Most nights we have a marathon 4-square game. We’ve even had a few water fights!
Related Post – Gardening with Kids – Child Led Activities
New Family Traditions
When all of this first started, we had to cancel our youngest’s birthday party – just two days before the party. If we’d scheduled it for the weekend before, it would have happened. So much changed in that week! That was the first time we had to let our kids know more than just the basics about what was going on with coronavirus. It was, understandably, such a huge disappointment to her. We knew life was going to change drastically, and the canceled birthday party was only the beginning.
In an attempt to help the kids (and give us some down time), we signed up for Disney+. Those who know us in real life will understand just how shocking this is for us! We got rid of cable 11 years ago and have pretty much replaced it with nothing. We just don’t watch T.V. and very few movies. Now that we’re isolated from friends and family, we’re letting them choose a Disney+ movie each night if they get all their school work done. The upside – it turns out that they LOVE documentaries! My past attempts were huge failures, but they’re loving the Nat Geo documentaries right now. Win!
Focusing on Self Care
I’m doing the 52 Hike Challenge this year, and this pandemic might make it difficult to accomplish it. As I write this, our Governor has issued a stay-at-home directive, but outdoor exercise (including hiking) is still allowed as long as social distancing is practiced. Our trails have gotten a bit crowded with many new people heading outdoors, but we’ve been going out at odd hours and on less popular trails. This is an important part of MY self care routine. I still believe (even with coronavirus) that it’s important to get out in nature as long as we’re responsible about it. Until the Governor’s order changes, we’ll continue to hit the trails close to home.
Related Post – Exploring Nature with Kids with Leave No Trace
This has certainly been a crazy month, and it seems like it’s going to last at least one more month. However, my predictions about the pandemic have been completely off. I never imagined we’d been forced to stay at home! We are trying to keep our spirits high by being productive with ending our school year early, having fun with our “extra” subjects, enjoying family time, and staying healthy by getting outside responsibly.
How has your homeschool routine changed during this pandemic?
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