School's out for... ever?

We're in the middle, well, not quite the middle yet apparently, but certainly somewhere in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. So we know lots of things are going to change and we even accept that life after the pandemic is unlikely to ever be as it was before.

We were advised by the PM yesterday that schools will shut down from Monday so I did think I had a few days to prepare. However, when child3 announced he was poorly this morning, spluttering his words between rather unusual sounding dry coughs, the reality hit that Coronavirus had struck and home-schooling would begin today.

I did decide at first that we would have a rest day today and work on our home learning schedule for a few days before starting properly. However, I ran out of patience around 17 minutes later when then kids hadn't stopped fighting and it wasn't even 9am yet.

With my usual enthusiasm for a new project, I dove into researching how to homeschool and launched a spreadsheet to begin tailoring our new routine.

In between working out our whole new life plan, we got a few bits of learning in. First, the class rules, a few times tables, spellings, word of the day (titillating... "this homeschooling is not very titillating, mum," fed back child1) and some reading. We topped it off with a family film fest (Modest Heroes and Kiki's Delivery Service) and plenty of cuddles. So I'm feeling really good about our achievements today. Slightly less pleased with the lack of housework I managed so best crack on! Pros: We have a new schedule in place now, the kids all learned something today, we drew rainbows and stuck them in the window to cheer people up and we had lots of cuddles! Cons: I've run out of ink so can't print the schedule, homeschool day #1 coincided with child4's longest running tantrum to date and it's almost 10pm and I need to start the housework. Oh, and child3 made some kind of miracle recovery within about an hour so it turns out they could've gone to school after all.