We’re heading into our third week of doing (trying to do) school work at home.
Last week actually didn’t go too badly, all things considered. Nerys was very keen and ticked off all the different pieces of work that school sent through for her.
Our school have been brilliant through all this. We get sent work through each Monday, normally one piece of work for each subject that they cover at school. It always comes with the instruction though, to do as much or as little of it as we want. And I really appreciate the fact that they’re not putting pressure on the children, or us parents, to get it all done.
The piece of work that Nerys was most excited about was science. We picked an experiment to try out, from a video that school sent us, and then she sat at the computer and typed up what she’d done and what happened. I think her typing and computer skills will really come on in the next few weeks, because she’s so keen to learn all about it.
She’s also enjoyed spending time in the garden over the last few weeks, helping dig up all the beds ready to (hopefully) put some plants that we’ve got starting to grow on the windowsills at the moment.
Rhys has helped out in the garden a bit too, and was quite excited to try out some of the garden tools.
He doesn’t tend to last as long as Nerys though before he heads back inside to go on the computer or draw pictures.
He’s really started to love art and drawing lately, and it’s amazing watching what he comes up with in his pictures.
One of his pieces of work last week for school was to create a poster about staying safe outside. We talked about how he could adapt this topic to make it relevant to life at the moment with the coronavirus. So he drew a poster with advice on staying 2 metres away from other people when you go out, washing your hands before and after you go out, and not touching things/picking things up.
He came up with the idea of putting each piece of advice in a cloud shape, or in one instance a hot air balloon shape, and then planned on attaching the rainbow he’s made to go in our window underneath the poster so it looks like a pretty sky scene.
I love that he can do this sort of creative work as part of his learning, to balance out the more formal bits of work he has to do with his maths and his English comprehension.
He’s found it harder than Nerys to get going with his school work at home, and I’ve struggled at times with finding a balance between pushing him to do it and not wanting to put too much pressure on and stress him out.
The thing I’m trying to remember is that no one knows what they’re doing at the moment. There’s no right or wrong way to be doing any of this, so we’ll just keep plodding on, do our best and take as many breaks as we need to to keep everyone happy.
How’s it all going in your house, if you’re doing school work at home with your children?
It sounds like you’re doing a fantastic job! We’re struggling a bit to get school work done – our school hasn’t really provided much guidance though so it’s difficult to know what they would be best spending their time on. It’s going to be so hard for teachers when they eventually go back because everyone is going to be at such different stages!