DAY 15

It was very quiet here today. Miss Nine spent the day with her dad, giving me my first long stretch of alone time in two weeks. In the morning I set up a Zoom meeting with some dear friends. We laughed and cried and talked for an hour. It was wonderful to see their faces and to share our fears and tears, love and support. We will be doing this on a weekly basis. What an amazing thing the internet can be! It's a little less painful to be isolated when we can use tools like this to connect. https://zoom.us/

After hearing from the governor yesterday that school would likely not open again this year I decided to spend the day organizing my home school resources. I am making weekly lesson plans, aimed at keeping up with what she was working on at school. None of us have a clue what is going to happen when school does resume. I am thinking that possibly they will go back in the summer to finish out the year. In the meantime, she is going to finish 4th grade at home.

I organized my bookmarks into folders by subject. I made an Excel spreadsheet to chart our plans each day. I dug some binders out of storage to keep our finished work in. I want to be able to demonstrate to the administrators that she actually did this work. I heard that the governor indicated that work at home would not count. I know from my previous experience as a home school mom that it can and will count. I think that most parents sincerely want their kids to get an education. They are not going to say that they did the work if they did not. However, it is a good idea to keep records.

In home school there is no need to kill trees by doing endless worksheets. Because of this it can be challenging to keep track of what is actually being learned. I found years ago if I documented every day what we did - games we played, art projects, field trips, books read, etc. that I felt confident that we were doing well. A long day in home school is about three hours. There is a lot of time taken up in a traditional classroom with crowd control and other distractions that are not an issue in home school. I hope I don't have trouble with crowd control in a classroom of one!