My key recommendations for home school:

declare victory

tell your kids they are promoted to their next grade

focus on minimizing what they are going to forget

It’s highly risky for us to have ANY activity go past 5pm. My emotional control is tapped! I can barely watch a Disney movie without tearing up. Kids are in a similar place, especially at the end of the day.

We enjoyed these two zucchini bread recipes => ONE and TWO

Here’s the week two link from our district’s Home School Bingo

Big picture from our home => I’ve let go of my academic goals. Mornings are school-focused and afternoons are specials. In my mind, school is “done” by lunch. We do a light day Saturday to catch up, if required on anything (the kids feel they) missed during the week.

Specials include: PE, music, art, cooking, science, training with parents, walks, lego and games.

With the science, we’ve been growing mold for a week. Kids love checking each day after school.

Our kids’ BJJ coach lives two blocks away so he runs PE. We drop the kids at a huge field near us (Chautauqua) and he does the session (with social distancing). Kids walk home afterwards and it ends up being ~90 minutes alone in an empty house. Heaven!

We used to use the school playing fields but the superintendent asked everyone to stop during April.

Our youngest does two or three short reading sessions each day. In terms of stuff that matters, getting our seven-year old to read is probably the only thing we need to achieve this year!

Just like regular school, our Grade Three (8) and Grade Five (11) kids read to self for 20-30 minutes each morning. This reading habit is a huge help for getting the day going, fixing breakfast and interacting with our youngest.

If the home school schedule gets tight, or the kids feel stressed, I drop their “in-school” reading assignments to free-up time.

Our district has been great. We have triple the content we need to run home school. Early last week, I tried to track/schedule everything and made everyone miserable! The family is doing better by doing less.

The last two summers, I have run home school across the summer. We are 19 weeks out from the start of the 2020/2021 academic year.

As I wrote yesterday, I have no idea if we are going to have any activities open across the summer. I figure my little-bit-a-day strategy has more staying power than trying to do “full” school for the six weeks left in the 2019/2020 academic year.

Remember you can hire favorite teachers for online tutoring. We’ve been using district teachers for tutoring for years. They will shortly be experts in online education and could use our support.

Virtual playdates. As I type this, our carefree seven-year old is happily chatting away with a buddy on FaceTime. They are planning a sleepover for when “this settles down.”

We got our first shipment from NetBricks.Biz. Worked great. Plus the kids have to spend time taking each project apart when they are done.

I received the Boy Scout Handbook and managed to get the kids to sit still for a short civics class over the weekend.

Virus Tracker

A friend sent along a national tracker for COVID-19 data. You can see the break down by state and forecast peak by state.

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Finance

I’m very bearish but if I sold out of equities then I’d have to figure out when to buy.

I don’t back myself to make timing calls.

Due to recent appreciation, this morning I sold a bit of equities to rebalance.

Chalk that up to another thing I would not have expected.