Due to COVID-19 and all schools being shut down, we have embarked on homeschooling. Though it is nice that we get to spend the one-on-one attention with the children and are able to lead them in the direction that we want them to go, I now am reminded in why I would never want to homeschool. I need a break!
Doing school full time is a lot of work. When the kids were at school, I would clean the house, do laundry, write on this blog and social media and complete other essential tasks such as shower. Now I am focused on the kids' education during the day and everything else gets left behind for the end of the day if I have time.
Preschool with Weston, or probably any preschooler for that matter, is difficult when there are other kids to deal with. Preschoolers need so much one-on-one attention that it is near impossible to keep him interested in his school work. Sometimes he is
completely unmotivated to do his school work, and to be honest, I also am unmotivated to keep him motivated. I may be the perfect parent (at least in my most humblest of opinions) but I am most definitely not the most perfect teacher. I will admit that there has been a bit more screen time than I would like, but hey you can learn a lot about life by watching Minecraft gaming videos on YouTube. Weston does his schooling, but once he's learned his letter for the week in the first hour on Monday, I've kinda run out of ideas for things for him to do. Thankfully he has a good teacher that does her best to interact with the kids, read stories to them, and sends coloring sheets.
Ryland on the other hand does his work quickly in the morning, and has run out of things to do by the afternoon. He can get a whole eight hour school day's worth of work done in a few hours and then get back to his important Minecraft videos. He says that he is an expert on the subject of Minecraft, though he has never actually played the game, nor do I even know how to get a hold of a copy of the game for our 10 year old Wii or whatever it is you play it on.
The one good thing about the homeschooling is that there is lunch delivered to the neighborhood daily during the week via bus. This would be their regular school lunch, which we would never normally buy, but because it is free to all who come and ask for it, we take a much needed break from our schooling/ YouTube watching and walk to the bus stop for free food and milk. They generally eat it, which saves money and time on figuring out what we are going to feed them on a daily basis.
Juliana is also been able to learn a little during this quarantine. She does Weston's printable so she is learning her colors and her letters, well, letters T through Z because that's where Weston's school left off when we started this thing. We are also taking advantage of the free ABC Mouse during this time, which Juliana really likes for t
he few seconds she's actually on it before switching over to watch videos on hamsters or baking cakes. She is learning to be a master baker via YouTube and wants to be a baker when she grows up, which is better than her other preoccupation which would involve training hamsters. With her desire for baking, so too has my interests increased, mainly because she keeps asking me to bake some sort of rainbow colored dessert.
So far, school is going well this last half of the year. I am using all of the knowledge imparted to me by my elementary educators in the 1990's, all of the information now being out of date such as how to properly add two large numbers, and also the powers of YouTube educators we will finish this school year. Our goal is to to soar into the next school year far above what would normally be accomplished during a normal school year, at least if next year all they need to know is how to use the internet to look up videos of hamsters playing Minecraft.
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