It’s here.
It’s happened.
That thing that we all thought would feel like an eternal snow day but really just locked most of us at home with tiny humans who are now dependent on us not only for food and shelter but now structure, schedules and education we are supposed to administer like we actually passed math in high school.
Corona-cation.
Up in this home, we are going through groceries like Hobbits and receiving links to educational websites like we’re receiving desperate travel discounts in emails.
Although school is only closed for many of us for two weeks, with new CDC guidance coming out daily, most of us don’t expect our superheroes to return to school for eight weeks, or maybe if Jesus comes first, ever.
WELCOME. For most of us, this is the new norm for the foreseeable future.
Want to make your life as smooth and easy as possible while simultaneously playing parent, teacher and manager of fighting children?
These are five tricks this lazy — I mean, organization-loving — mama learned her first year of homeschooling Superhero 4.
1. Take a day to prep your space. Most of us have been thrown into homeschooling and educating without the space or organization to begin. Take a full day or even weekend to clean, organize and create the physical and mental space needed to do this well. If your space feels chaotic, you’ll feel chaotic, too.
Our team spent two full days deep cleaning and purging the house and then organizing every game and educational tool we already had available to us. It’s amazing how many books, games, toys, etc. don’t get touched during the school year. You can get a full day of play by just reintroducing all the items you shelved from last summer!
Some baskets or “centers” you can assemble to allow your superheroes to access them and work independently (AKA, buy you some time when you need to be helping one superhero or the other, or possibly trying that showering thing you heard some adults get to do):
a. An art basket. Pop paper, writing materials, colored paper and broken crayons. Add a plastic table cloth and some paint brushes if you’re feeling brave.
b. A craft basket. Cloth scraps, pipe cleaners, buttons and all the random junk you find lying around the house can be redeemed for creative crafts in this season. When it’s all in one basket, it’s amazing what superheroes will think to do with it.
c. A creation basket. Make a Play Doh or kinetic sand kit with old cookie molds, or create a Lego basket with printed out designs from online that children have to try to recreate.
d. A puzzle or game basket.
e. A writing basket. Add journals, writing utensils and a can of possible writing prompts. It’s also a great way for kiddos to process this change of life pace.
f. A digital learning center. Place a used laptop, iPad or Kindle in one section of your “centers” space and open it to one of the bajillion websites your teachers would like your children using.
g. A morning work basket. This includes workbooks, printed worksheets from online (your teachers have surely given you 5 million by now), counting tools, white boards, etc. These should be things your kiddos can tackle with minimum assistance from you but that give them practice in their current areas of study.
h. An exercise corner. In it, place a yoga mat, a print-out of stretches or yoga poses or an exercise routine kiddos can execute without help from you (25 sit-ups, 25 push-ups, 25 jumping jacks, etc.).
i. A reading comprehension basket. Choose five books from the library or home that the kiddos haven’t read, and print out comprehension questions for each book. Children choose a book from the basket and then complete the questions afterward.
j. An extra chores basket. Nothing like some manual labor to keep the kids from killing each other while home with no other humans for weeks on end. Make a list of all the things you’ve always wanted done around the house but just never got to. Add a value to each chore. (This can be a monetary value, like 25 cents, or it can be an award value, like 10 minutes of television. Note: These should be chores above and beyond their normal household responsibilities.) Kids can choose to tackle some extra work, and you can have some extra help with all these extra humans at home.
2. Choose wisely, and guilt-free give up the rest. In this season of long-distance learning, we are receiving links to websites and games and educational activities we could be or should be doing like the Apocalypse is coming. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the awesomeness we as homeschool parents can cram into one day. But here’s the deal. We only have so many hours in a day, and if we’re really going to ENJOY them with our children, we can’t just be running from one “have to” to another. It’s exhausting, overwhelming and a total joy killer in the home. Tackle first the work required by teachers and schools, and be choosy about what you do with the rest. Let each superhero choose one or two things he/she would like to focus on in this season, and tackle only one or two big family projects at a time. Yes, this is an unprecedented opportunity in history to learn and grow and play and be together. But it’s also an unprecedented opportunity for family laughter, fun and rest. Give yourself permissions for PLAY and TOGETHERNESS to be as important on the to-do list as the 500 things you feel like your children need to perfect before next school year.
3. Set a schedule, and post it where every member of the family can see. Have superheroes who aren’t yet literate? Use pictures or icons to communicate. Reliable routines let your superheroes know what to expect, and they help you to feel confident managing the day. You don’t have to be stressed out about the middle schooler’s math lessons at 9 a.m. if you know you’ve already set aside math time for noon. And you don’t have to wonder when you are going to have time to pay bills if you’ve already instituted an afternoon quiet reading time for you to tackle YOUR life list. The schedule doesn’t have to dictate your day, but it can help you best manage your time and reduce your stress level.
4. Lose the laundry. Here’s the deal. Ain’t no one seeing your or your people’s digs for the next two to eight weeks. Celebrate, and save yourself the folding, ironing and organizing. In this house, each family member chose one set of play clothes and one set of pajamas. Each day, ALL that day’s clothes go directly into the washer, not the laundry baskets, and we wash one load at night. In the morning, we toss that one load from the dryer onto the couch, and our people wear the same thing they wore the day before. There’s no folding. There’s no putting away. There’s simply retrieving the one shirt, pants, socks and underwear and throwing the pajamas directly in the wash. (The only exception to this is for exercise wear.)
5. Simplify meals and delegate them out. You are now not only parent, but possibly work-from-home professional and now full-time teacher. Unless you love cooking, this is not the time to turn gourmet chef. Some ways you can simplify meal prepping and planning:
a. Create a theme for each day, like Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, etc. It narrows down the thinking you have to do to come up with a meal plan for that day.
b. Try a meal planning service. We’ve used CookSmarts for years. Not only are my meals planned out for the week, but with one click, I can modify each meal and then print a grocery list BY AISLE for every meal I’m making that week. (Talk about being in public grocery stores for as few minutes as possible!) It takes less than 10 minutes from meal planning to store. What’s better, the recipes even come with helpful video tutorials, so our oldest two superheroes can make the meals by themselves. And the meals have introduced our family to flavors we would have never tried without them.
c. Assign a superhero to complete meal prep. Superhero 1 cuts, peels and preps all our fruits, veggies and snacks for the week on grocery day. That means we have fresh fruits and veggies ready to go, and we’re not wasting time with food prep at snack time.
d. Assign each superhero a night to cook. In our house, the oldest two superheroes can independently make their assigned meals on their nights to cook while the younger two still need assistance. It’s a great way to not only teach them life skills (these boys are NOT going to college until they can prove to me they can make more than Ramen), but it gives me two full nights off. The benefit of being the Cook of the Day? You get dinner chores and dishes off that night. In our house, there are brawls over whose night it is to cook.
e. Work smarter, not harder. Our team does Make Your Own Pizza night on naan crust every Friday night. We deliberately prep more veggies than needed for the pizza bar so that we can turn those toppings into Make Your Own Omelette Saturdays the very next day. Reduce your workload by seeing which meals you can make work together each week.
f. Turn food prep into a homeschool cooking class. Yesterday’s homeschool in our house? Learning how to blaze a trail on our property and assembling five freezer meals we can use for ourselves (we have one down with Flu A and are just waiting for the other flies to drop) or others who might need them in the upcoming weeks. THIS awesome freezer meal plan provided both a grocery list and instructions for five healthy, easy meals that even Superhero 4 could easily help assemble.
And at the end of the day, lower your expectations, give yourself grace and let a life well lived be your goal. Your children are not going to fail this year of school because you didn’t execute all 593 ideas every teacher sent home. If homeschooling looks more like grabbing groceries for a shut-in neighbor or making cards for someone in need of encouragement, celebrate!
Service, relationship and character will last far longer than Khan Academy anyway.
(Fabulous mug photo by Asanda Ntshiqa on Unsplash)