How to Make the Most of Your Days When School is Out
As we watched the news and followed as the pandemic became more ever-present, one of our greatest fears was the closing of schools. I am sure parents everywhere had the same thoughts:
How will I work during the day?
What will I do to keep the kids busy at home?
How will the kids stay on track with their school work?
This is what I learned in my house:
We are all just making it one day at a time, determining the plan for the day over breakfast. We have a list of family projects and we discuss and decide together what project we want to take on each day. When we complete a family project, Hendrix is proud of his handiwork and we are proud that we accomplished more than changing our kids out of their pajamas and feeding them three times a day.
There is no telling how long this will be our reality but for now, we are all doing the best we can.
I am not going through my to-do lists as quickly as I thought I would. And that’s ok with me. We are forced to slow down and realize we have have plenty of time to get work done so we we are living day-by day.
Our children are not going to be rocket scientist when they go back to school. And that’s ok with us too. There were a lot of ambitious parents sharing a draft schedule of activities to keep their children busy while school is not in session. We don’t wake up at 7:00 a.m and go through a strict schedule to keep everyone on track but our kids seem to be adjusting to their new normal nicely and that is all we can hope for.
Here are a few of our favorite family activities:
Making our family tree - We started by identifying who should be represented, finding the photos and mapping out the tree. After placing everyone in their rightful place, Hendrix called family historians and asked about the full names and birth years of members of family tree who passed away before he was born. We finished the project by decorating it with an apple tree. We suggest making your own family tree because its gives kids the opportunity to understand how your family members are related and, as a bonus, they get to know more about them by asking other family members for details about family they never had the opportunity to meet.
Baking - We can’t be the only ones who have a hard time getting our littles to eat green vegetables. We experimented with baking sweet spinach muffins. With Hendrix measuring and adding ingredients to the mixer and pouring the contents into muffin tins, we were pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get him to eat spinach. For any parents looking for a way to sneak vegetables in to your little’s diet, we recommend muffins!
Designing a city of cardboard boxes - We saved cardboard boxes for about a week before we started to decorate them to replicate different buildings throughout our city. We then created a city of main streets and neighborhoods with cul de sacs. We enjoyed talking through both building design and city planning. There were so many opportunities for creativity to come through.
Creating a family portrait - who doesn’t love a family portrait. This allowed Hendrix to demonstrate how he sees each member of our family. He explained many of his artistic choices and it was exciting to see ourselves through his lens.
While we dreaded the long days at home with our kids with no school days or weekend activities to break it up, we have to admit that this quarantine is providing unexpected quality time. We, admittedly, don’t fill our days with meaningful activities. If you were to peak in our window at times you would see children watching movies while eating snacks, coloring at the table while we drink our coffee or playing with their toys while we try to binge-watch the most talked about series with a glass of wine.
Let us know some of your favorite activities. We seem to have plenty of time!