Easing Into Our New Norm Gently: Covid-19 Lockdown Week 1

At the turn of the year, who would have thought things would be this way in just a few months time?

We were all saying we’d miss the kids when they went back to school after the Christmas break. After February many muttered that half term wasn’t long enough and wished Easter would get here quickly.

Well, we now have the kids home sooner than expected and under the most extreme and unprecedented circumstances. Gosh, that really is a word I NEVER want to hear again once this is all over!

It’s something new for everyone and the uncertainty of just how long we will all be home for is what many of us are struggling with.

We’ve been thrown into such strange times, with no preparation for it at all and we are all scared.

We are trying very hard here to go with the flow currently and to ease ourselves in gently, after all, we don’t know how long we are all home for, unable to venture out whenever the mood takes us and it is hard on everyone.

Our week started so well, I gave the children detention for oversleeping and missing registration. They settled into school work in the kitchen at the work stations I had set up and were enthusiastic about it all. They both completed the Maths and Englis tasks set out for the day and declared it break time.

After that, we struggled to get back into the swing of actual assigned school work so headed into the garden for ‘Gardening club’. They helped to cut the grass and weed the garden, learning life skills as they went. Well, if we are going to be stuck at home we may as well make our surroundings pretty and comfortable. We’ve planted up all our vegetable seeds this week too getting our veggie patches ready for later on in the year.

Home economics was the last lesson of the day – they helped to cook dinner.

Children learn through hands-on experiences and if that means I have help around the house while they ‘learn’ I am all for this way of teaching. Emmy has also helped to clean the window this week, you can’t get much more hands-on than that!

By Tuesday, when they were late to school again and Paul was now home from work for the foreseeable on paid leave, I knew this was all too real already and the unknown and fear set in for me. It was also the day I had my official diagnosis of Diabetes and spent a good 30 minutes on the phone to the nurse learning what that meant for me in terms of tablets, diets, exercises and things I needed to change.

As if things hadn’t already changed enough this week, something else was thrown into the mix but it all seems manageable (getting hold of my prescription has been the hardest part so far).

Schoolwork has been adapted early on in our journey, the children aren’t at all interested in the sheets provided by the school so we’ve chosen topics they are interested in and geared learning around those. They are still ones they would be covering in school but we’ve chosen a far more hands-on approach which works for us.

making slime scaled e1585578215525 — Science class – making slime

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We are working on telling the time with Harry, seasons, days, months of the year etc – we’ve drawn pictures of different seasons, looked at clocks and watches and learnt how to read the time from those.

We’ve also been working on counting change back from one pound. He really enjoyed this, especially when it meant he got to play with all the change in my purse to buy things and then kept the money if he got the maths correct.

Emmy is working on a topic on Vikings and Romans, researching interesting facts and writing about them. She is also making a Viking ship from paper and we will be junk modelling one too.

I’ve not pushed them to do a set amount of work every day, because we are all finding this new norm very hard and need to do it gently for all our sakes. We’ve played lots of family games, build with Lego and building blocks and had lots of fun.

They were also gifted new tablets just before lockdown thanks to Paul’s Dad, and we have loaded those with Maths and English games, brain training puzzles and they are also working through the Minecraft educational worlds, so while they think they are playing games and having fun for more time than they are actually allowed they are learning at the same time.

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This weekend was spent in Pyjamas for all of us – we needed to be on our own and that’s what we did for most of the daytime. The kids in their rooms watching TV and playing games, Paul in our bedroom watching movies and I was on the sofa reading and had half an eye on a movie.

Table of Contents

Currently, one week in:

My house has never been so tidy – I’ve pulled out all the kitchen, cleaned and sorted

Bleached the bathrooms until my hands cracked and bled
We are all fit and healthy
Added rainbows to the windows
Have cut the grass in the backgarden (the front needs doing but the lawnmower died)
done arts and crafts every day
Planted up the vegetable seeds and homed on the window sills to start growing our own veg again this year