Home Learning: Episode 6

I’m not even sure what to say about home learning at this point. I mostly let her get on with it and am pretty lenient about when she starts and ends, as long as she gets the work done that the teacher is requiring.

I haven’t taught the child a lick of sewing and the bread I tried to make yesterday was edible, but just barely, because I forgot the second addition of yeast. (The munchkin asked for Italian bread.)

I help when she needs it but encourage her to try on her own. She tends to ask questions she knows the answer to –

“Mom, what is 34 minus 6?”

“I don’t know, what IS 34 minus 6?”

Silence.

“Oh, it’s 28.”

“Yes.”

Even when she is working on something independently, she likes to work in the same room I’m in AND talk out loud through it. That makes it very hard for me to concentrate. But it’s also fantastic to watch her sometimes. She just got off the couch, got down on her knees and proceeded to pull herself across the floor using her hands, just to get a pencil from her little table. I don’t care about the knees of her pants, it was funny, and what adult does something like that? It’s a way of looking at the world, uncurbed by propriety and the judgmental world, that we could all use a little bit of in our heads.

Today I went through the packets her teachers sent home initially and found a bunch of the things she never did before the online schoolwork started. She finished her online work for the day so I told her I want her to do some reading after lunch, then focus on some kind of art project. I also set her to work with a pumpkin recipe magazine we got last fall and told her to find a recipe we could make because I have a can of pumpkin on the shelf. And her father took her for a walk after he got done with work.

I am trying to do my own work and provide meals three times a day for the denizens of our house. Trying not to get too distracted by social media. Drinking bad coffee that has hid in the back of the cupboard. Getting to sleep late then waking in the middle of the night unable to get back to sleep, and getting up later than I would like. (Thank goodness for no commute!)

I related a great deal to this article that a friend posted, from Today’s Parent, Why is no one talking about how unsustainablethis is for working parents?

We will get through this and school will go back to being what it was, I believe. In the meantime, we do the best we can. We're watching our veggie seeds grow every day.