Apocalypse homeschool: week 1

We’ve been homeschooling our fifth grader for the last week due to the pandemic. Here’s a report on what we’ve done, in case it’s useful to others. The links will link to the resources if free, or to info about free trials — lots of online learning companies are making resources free during the pandemic.

We’ve been refining a daily schedule based on three general categories of learning:

1. Online learning systems that the school was already using — Dreambox for math and Lexia for literacy. (I can also recommend the self-paced courses at code.org, which teach programming to any age group.
   These are self-paced and gamified so that kids can and (at least in my case) will do them by themselves. So I try to intersperse these among the topics that are more labor-intensive for us grown-ups.
2. Continuing in-class work. Conveniently, Z’s teacher has been posting all their assignments online all year through Sharepoint and OneNote. So, we’ve had Z continue working on the larger assignments that were already in progress. In our case, that’s an informational essay about dogs, and a science project about the water cycle. (Parenthetically, this is how I learned they’re using Amplify Science, and I freaking love it, but it’s not a free online resource.)Hopefully we’ll be done with those projects by Monday, and then we can switch to having Z come up with project ideas. I’d like them to pick a part of history to learn about, for example. They’ve also shown interest in doing either a diorama or a Minecraft mockup of a Roman villa.
3. THE FUN PART: special topics based on our and Z’s interests!We’re lucky to have four adults at home, all of whom are erstwhile teachers! So we brainstormed a list of topics we’d be willing to teach, either regularly or as one-offs. They range from very academic (Latin, brain anatomy, number theory) to pretty informal (photo editing, ukulele, cookie baking). For these topics, we’ve used a mix of resources we had around the house, educational videos, and worksheets I’ve found online. See some examples here.
   Some of my friends have been nervous about homeschooling, but no matter who you are and what your background is, I’m sure there are things you can share with your kid about your job, your hobby, your neighborhood, etc.It doesn’t even have to be academic. My sister printed a map of their neighborhood and had my nephew map out how he’d get to the store to buy dog food. I’m totally stealing that idea! And I know some parents who are focusing on social/emotional learning over the break. (And an education professor went viral today saying she and her kids will spend the break watching Netflix and eating cookies!)

Here’s a side-by-side of our schedule on day 1 (made by Z) vs. today (made by me):

You can see I’m less ambitious, and also only write the schedule in erasable pen, lol. And in both cases, only about half of the subjects actually happened.