Steven has been required to read daily since he started school. Sometimes he gets away with not doing it on weekends, and he usually doesn’t do it on holidays. Some things just aren’t worth an argument.
This year we decided that as long as he reads for at least 30 minutes each “school day”, he won’t have to read other days. Luckily over the last few years he has finally started finding books he actually wants to read. But he tends to only read certain types of books (suspense, horror, mystery and Pokemon mangas), so this year I want him to try and diversify his reading list.
I’ve been trying to think of ways to make this year more fun, ways to keep Steven engaged and motivate him to keep trying instead of getting frustrated and arguing with us all the time (which happened a lot last school year, first with home schooling and then with the distance learning provided by the school). Motivating him has been hard over the years. He willingly tries everything, but if he doesn’t get it right away he often gives up. Sometimes he’ll get really into something and he’ll get past the “I’m not good at this” stage and start to improve, but then he reaches a harder part and gives up. We all do this sometimes, and we’ve talked about how this is normal and you just can’t give up, but often it ends in arguing.
We’ve done a lot of talking about school over the last few months, especially recently. We were waiting to see what the school board had planned, but school is only a few weeks away and they haven’t given us much. Schools are opening again. Grades 4+ are expected to wear masks, but class sizes aren’t reduced at all so social distancing will be impossible. They are “cohorting” so that kids are with all the same kids all the time, and staggering breaks, but teachers for French and Music and such will still be visiting all classes. And there are some huge things they haven’t addressed. Like, Steven’s school only has 3 washrooms. Each one is shared by like 8 classrooms. Is it someone’s job to constantly clean the washroom? What about shared resources? Library books? Art supplies? Toys?
This is not my first attempt at blogging. Usually I get busy or tired or depressed or I think “no one really cares anyways” (actually that’s probably the depression talking) and I just stop. But this one is different. This one is for me. And maybe that’s a lesson. Maybe they all should have been for me.
Today, as I’m sitting down to look at our homeschooling binder and preparing to at least catch Steven up on grade 5 while the uncertainty of a new school year looms (more on that later, I think), I’m realizing that there are tons of things I haven’t shared here. So here’s a list, in vaguely chronological order… the order I found the photos in dropbox anyways. I didn’t really edit them… so sorry for the mess that might be in the background.
I’m not a person who really believes in gods or people who have passed away looking out for us or whatever. I don’t even really believe “everything happens for a reason”, though I do like to point out a silver lining when I see it.
This was supposed to be a day 100 post… but somehow even in quarantine time is elusive, lol. I know I haven’t really been posting. Work is exhausting and family time is precious, and I just haven’t found the will or the time.
So, Steven dropped the homeschool thing pretty fast. He stuck with the assignments being sent from school for quite a while, but the last few weeks were difficult. We’ll have to see what September looks like. If we continue homeschooling it will be with a much different schedule. Only an hour a day or so most likely. There isn’t actually that much material to cover, it just takes longer to cover it in a traditional school setting.
Luckily, Doug Ford declared the Easter Bunny an essential service earlier this month. Steven is hoping he’ll do the same for Santa in December. I’m hoping he won’t have to. But the way this thing is going, he might.
I was hoping for an outdoor egg hunt this year, but there’s a huge storm on the way. We had snow on Good Friday and now a storm Easter Sunday and Monday. People are saying it’s Mother Nature’s way of saying “stay indoors”. Hopefully people are.
Regardless, Steven had fun finding all the treats the Easter Bunny had left for him. He even found some kinder eggs in the egg carton in the fridge and a chocolate rabbit in the bread box.
There was also this huge “smashers” egg left out on the table that had a whole bunch of messy activities in it, through which he found a bunch of bones to build a dinosaur skeleton toy.
And he got a big Miraculous Ladybug Kinder Surprise egg. Steven and I love that show, we watch it together whenever there are new episodes. We had already collected all the toys from the little kinder eggs over the past year or so, but never found the larger ones in the store. He requested I ask his aunt to find more if she can, “because if the Easter Bunny found them maybe they’re in stock now”.
We’re going to have another video chat family dinner tonight. This time we’ll use Steven’s laptop. Hopefully, it will work better than the tablet. And Steven requested peanut butter pasta tonight, so that’s what I’ll be making. Not a traditional Easter dinner, but that’s alright. It will be nice to see everyone at least.
This blogging thing might become weekly. Or whenever I feel like it. Work is exhausting, even at home. But it’s nice to see my family on my breaks.
Steven did most of the rest of the social studies unit we had started on Wednesday. I think he’s trying to finish it so he can have Wednesdays off. It’s not a bad idea to have a day off in the middle of the week, really. He did the math work from school yesterday and today. He could have finished it in a day, but apparently he thought he needed to do it in order, and one of the tasks said “talk to someone about math”, so instead of talking to one of us about it he went “my friends aren’t online, so I can’t talk to them about math, guess I better quit and play Roblox”. Hopefully that won’t happen next week.
After finishing the math today, we watched the video that had been assigned for Music (“Beethoven lives upstairs”) while decorating paper Easter eggs to put up in the windows. There was a post on a local Facebook group about putting up eggs so kids walking with their parents can still do an “egg hunt” this weekend even though all the usual ones at the parks and such are cancelled.
Now we’re working on finishing up our birds we started a few weeks ago. I don’t think they’ll be done today, we’ve had some technical difficulties. The model magic can be painted pretty easily, but it’s a little fragile. So Steven’s bird lost a wing and we’re waiting for the glue to dry.
Hope everyone has a fun and safe Easter weekend! ~Lauren
Yesterday was crazy, so I didn’t post. Steven started distance learning and I started working from home after putting on one of my homemade masks and leaving the house for the first time in 2 weeks to take the bus to work and get some on-site training and pick up my computer and take a taxi back home… we were all busy and I was so anxious about going out and setting everything up at home was hectic… But today everything calmed down, and hopefully it will be the start of a new routine.
The buses have been split in two and back boarding for free for weeks, but this time when I went on there were signs saying no more than 15 passengers allowed and stopping people from sitting beside each other… and still someone thought it was ok to stand directly behind me at the door when we were waiting to get off the bus!
Steven’s teachers are providing weekly work for Language Arts, Math, French and Music so far (yesterday it was just the first two, but the others were added this afternoon). Each subject is broken down to do a bit every day, but Steven has decided he wants to stick to the homeschool schedule we had already established. So yesterday he did as much of the assigned language work for the week as he could, and then today he studied the next part of the body (the digestive system on Kids Health) and did the rest of the language work.
Steven’s teachers are using Google Classroom to communicate, and Steven has really been enjoying being able to talk to his school friends again in the chat room there. Their first assignment was to write about what they have been doing since school ended. They were supposed to write a paragraph and maybe add a picture or two, I’m pretty sure Steven wrote a few pages. But he was really excited to tell everyone about our adventures in the last few weeks.
This morning, it was really nice outside, so Steven wanted to do PhysEd outside. He probably also didn’t want to clean up the mess in the living room, but he said it was because of the weather anyways. So found a recording of the beep test. Our yard is nowhere near 20 meters, but he’s younger than the kids that normally do this test, and I didn’t want to make it too hard on him anyways.
I gave him some chalk and told him that if he ran really fast to the other side, he could draw on the fence until the next beep. It ended up being a pretty fun activity for him. There was some laughter anyways, as his drawings were repeatedly interrupted and he tried to rush to the other side in time to continue.
I mostly work in the afternoons, and I’m hoping that will continue to be my schedule so that I can do PhysEd and French with Steven in the mornings and then get him set up with the day’s work before I have to start working myself.
Working from home is eerily quiet. Everyone has been doing a great job keeping quiet while I’m working, but I’m used to being in a call centre surrounded by people. I’ve often complained about the noise, but now I miss it. Especially when there’s time between calls, and I can’t just turn to my neighbour and start a conversation. But I often knit when I’m on the phone, and I realized today that I am no longer limited to small, portable projects at work. I could totally make a sweater or something, because I don’t have to take it with me to and from work and keep it out of my coworkers’ space. I have a whole room! So that’s exciting.
My posts might become less frequent now that I’m working again because that’s taking up 9 hours of my day, but I’m going to keep updating when I can.
I need to go to work tomorrow. That is kind of terrifying. But it’s just one more day. I need to get on the bus, go to work, get my work at home training and take a taxi home with my work at home equipment, hopefully without coming in contact with too many people. And then hopefully we can all be home and safe until this is all over.
But, I saw some statistics on Facebook the other day that showed the effect all of this self-isolating is having on the flu. It’s way down compared to this time last year. The hope is that if this is working on the flu, it’s also working on Covid-19. But it’s too early to tell. The flu has a really short incubation period, so the data comes available quicker.
Today, I finished sewing the masks I was making. I had posted them on facebook and Grandma asked for some, so I just made a whole bunch. I don’t know who will use them now, but maybe they’ll seem less silly later. I had to sew them now because my sewing table needs to be turned into a work from home computer desk. So that’s done. And now I just have to run my new 100 foot ethernet cable through the whole house to our spare room that will be an office for the foreseeable future.
Homemade masks. They don’t have ties because I ran out, but Liam’s sister said she could add some elastic for me before giving them to whoever wants them.
Once I was done that, Steven and I made homemade pizza pockets. We use this recipe for the dough, and then roll it out and use a dumpling mold to make the hot pockets. I forgot how quickly they get eaten! I thought we had made enough to freeze some, but all 3 trays will be gone in the next couple days I’m sure.
Not the greatest photo of Steven working, but you get the idea.
Hope everyone had an awesome weekend. This week will be interesting for us. Steven’s teacher is starting to send assignments online, I’m starting to work from home… we’ll just have to take it one day at a time.
