Tuesday, March 17 — The daily routine now looks like this:
5 a.m. — Matthew and I wake up and go to our respective work stations. I work at the kitchen table with a tiny chromebook that can be tucked underneath the napkin basket when it’s time to eat. The kitchen table is also situated by the back door, so I am frequently interrupted to let the animals in and out. On the flipside, I’m close to the coffee pot.
Matthew has set up a card table in the bedroom with an ugly spider of electrical cords for headset, double monitor, and video conferencing supplies atop a precarious, but ingenious wood slab stacked on a laundry basket to create a standing desk.
His comment as we rumbled into action for a second morning seemed to echo the reality of day two versus the novelty of day one, “Hello, room I don’t leave.”
6 a.m. — Wyatt’s usual wake-up time. He fixes his own breakfast and is otherwise self-sufficient, whittling his ready time to about 7 minutes. He has honed this craft to maximize his video game time, and I suspect this trend will continue since no-video-games-until-you’re-ready-for-school is still a rule.
7 a.m. – Emery wanders from the bedroom to catch up with the day.
8:45 a.m. – The kids and I take the dog for a walk to simulate their usual walk to school and generally break up our time in the living room.
9 – 9:30 a.m. – Morning meeting and snack. Over apples and peanut butter, the kids help generate a few rules for homeschool. Raise your hand, try your best, no devices during school time (that’s for me), clean up after the school day (that’s for them), and we will not call this homeschool but Limelight Learning (because that’s the name of our street and homeschool sounds boring and unofficial). I want to do a cheer or song every morning, but Wyatt vehemently vetoes that as “too cheesy.”
The kids sharpen pencils, stock their tool buckets (aka Easter baskets) with scissors, books, craft supplies, etc. and then mark sections of their composition notebooks for math, reading and writing, specials, and independent projects.
We are ready for Limelight Learning.
9:30 – 10 a.m. – I talk with Wyatt about what he’s been learning in math recently. Turns out it’s fractions, so the first page in his math section ends up being a review of the skill, he shows me an example, and then I help him write the rule. I’m pleased with the three columns of reference we’ve created on the fly, and I only have to consult the internet once to make sure we’re doing the math right.
Emery plays on Math Prodigy while we do this.
10:00 – 10:30 a.m. – The kids swap places, and Emery tells me she needs practice adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers (ok, not in so many words, but after we talk for a while, that’s what I decide). We use playing cards to generate some problems like 12 + 27 and 54 – 48, and she has to arrange the cards in appropriate digit places so the problems make sense. I pat myself on the back; she seems to be having fun with this.
But then I watch her try to solve the problems that require regrouping and I’m baffled at how convoluted it is. She’s using number lines and skip counting on one. Then she writes a long narrative to explain what she does on the next one. Well…way to go Common Core; it’s clear she’s able to think through what she’s doing, but holy cow is it inefficient and confusing. At one point, when she gets lost in her own thinking, I show her how I learned, setting the numbers vertically atop each other to do the borrowing and whatnot and try to connect it to what she was doing. It seems to make sense to her, but she also looks deflated.
We are all grateful when the neighbors knock on the door to see if the kids can come outside and play.
10:30 – 11:15 a.m. – Recess for the kids. Email for Mom.
11:15 – 11:45 a.m. – Independent reading for everyone! Secretly, this is my favorite part of Limelight Learning.
11:45 – Noon – Writing. Finally, my wheelhouse. I decide to teach the kids how to make text-to-self connections as a way of relating to and understanding what you read. It doesn’t mean you experience the exact same thing as a character, I explain, but you can see how some part of the experience — maybe the feeling, the problem, the resolution — connects to something you’ve experienced. I compare our current quarantine situation to Anne Frank hiding in the attic with her family — a bit extreme, yes, but they get it. “Instead of Nazis, we are hiding from….”
“Coronavirus!” they chime.
“Instead of having to be quiet so that we don’t get caught, we have to….”
“Wash our hands!” They are really into this.
“So how does making this connection change how you view Anne Frank or how you view our current situation?”
Emery looks a little scared. Wyatt wants to figure out a better way to fight the coronavirus Nazis.
And that is how you make the worst text-to-self connection ever.
Noon – 2ish: Lunch and extended recess. I drive to school to get some more books before the building will be closed for “deep cleaning.”
As I’m leaving, another teacher arrives with a hot tip that the Family Dollar down the street was restocking toilet paper as she left. I’m on it.
2 – 3 p.m. – Our special project for today is making leprechaun traps. We pull out streamers, tape, boxes, and popsicle sticks. Kids sketch out design plans and get to work.
3 – 3:15 p.m. – Read aloud. After a vote, we’re all snuggled on the couch with Harry Potter.
3:15 p.m. – Limelight Learning convenes for the day! I give the kids Smarties I had otherwise purchased as public school treats and we take the dog for a hike in the foothills. Our neighborhood trail is bumping.
All-in-all, the day is kind of fun, and the kids are exceptional troopers.
Unfortunately, it ends weird. At some point before we sit down to dinner, I am looking in the pet rat cage and notice Rover, Wyatt’s rat, is not moving. I touch him, and he is cold.
“Uh…Matthew, can you come here?” I panic. That is definitely a dead rat.
The kids help gather rocks to mark his grave; Emery takes it hard, and cries through my final words to Rover.
“He was a good friend to Storm. Always the shy guy. We will miss you.” And then Wyatt says he wants to be the one to place the dirt back over his burial spot.
Dinner is tense. I find myself staring at my daughter’s finger, now swollen from where Rover bit her earlier in the morning. She had also mentioned she didn’t sleep well last night because the rats were fighting.
Before I go to sleep for the night, paranoia makes me peek on Storm, Emery’s rat, to make sure he is still alive. I find him balled up in the hollow nest of bedding where his cage-mate had been just hours before. His fur rises and falls with each little rat breath. I blow kisses at my sleeping children, cut off their lights and try to avoid setting off the leprechaun traps as I tip-toe out of their rooms.
Read. Write. Repeat. 