Tuesday: ladder, ELA, moats

Let's start with ELA (English Language Arts) and get the bad part of the day out of the way.  I don't know what Isaac's problem is, but he pretends to be incapable of doing the worksheets.  Today he had to read a story and write five questions that he could also answer.  It took him ten minutes to write one.  We even talked about it before hand.  Then I came in there for something else and was like, "you can write a what question about any sentence!" and even that took another five minutes before he got one he liked.  Now, I know I'm not an English major or a teacher.  I know we're in some weird times and that in school he probably would have gotten more advice before doing the assignment.  But he isn't that poor of a student that he can't write five questions! 

Anyway, I emailed his teacher.  She said that this is pretty normal for him (which scared me a little bit), but she's also never made a huge deal about it.  We discussed a few options.  Isaac and I will be talking about some options tomorrow.  While I don't feel as though we need to do every single worksheet, I do feel as though he should be able to do some of them when asked to do so.  Stay tuned.  (This was only the second day of distance learning and our school has been very relaxed!  I'm starting to understand what some of the parents are talking about now.)

Moving on.  I graded "most" of the day.  And by "most" I mean I kept sitting down, grading a few parts of an assignment, and then getting up to do something else.  Grading isn't fun to begin with, and progress was so slow.  Luckily, one of my graders is willing to help me with the final exams so that is a relief.

Moving on again, to the fun parts of the day.  The cats enjoyed the ladder.  Joshua played with it a bit and Isaac just a little bit, so it'll be coming down tomorrow.

Today's lego challenge was a river with dams, like you see at science museums.  It kept Joshua occupied pretty well.  I let Isaac do it for his science part of the day, since in involved testing and fixing and retesting.  Much better than a worksheet.

Joshua also made a crazy complicated card/maze/game for Pat.  I made a video of the solution since there's no way she'll be able to figure it out herself.  It involves portals and keys and a puzzle and a good dose of five year old logic.

Monday: ladder

Joshua's lego challenge today was a zoo.  You can see the giant flamingo, dragon, spider, and ladybug.  There are also two...somethings and a parrot hidden in a box.

Joshua worked hard on a card for Scarlet today.  Ben is working on putting all of our dragons together.

Today's gym activity was to climb a ladder, get an easter egg from the top, put it in a bucket, climb down the ladder, lower the bucket down, and do whatever was in the egg.  Isaac enjoyed it until he had to sing a song.  Joshua did all 19 eggs and it kept him nice and busy.  I gave them a ladder safety course at the beginning and they both remembered the key points rather well.

Aunt C stopped by briefly.  (We stay far apart.)  Except that she seems to be Horizon's favorite person; he came rushing up to her shortly after he heard her voice.

Isaac wrote something weird for writing time.  But he wrote and that's half the battle right now.  I especially like how he sounded out fyu for phew.

Sunday

The boys trapped Ben...again...and again told me that Ben is picking on them.

They worked on deflating the ducky.  They initiated it, which I was thankful for because it's really too big to have in the house right now.  They spent a surprising amount of time working on deflating it.  Oh, and look!  I finished a puzzle.  It seems like a mandatory thing to do while in quarantine.

Saturday: Lego organizing

We've worked pretty hard at reorganizing the Lego sets this past week.  I completely cleaned off the Lego shelves that had been accumulating small pieces and random mini-figures.  We also moved all the Lego set buckets to the basement...Joshua decided he wanted to finish that up this morning and worked really hard at it.

Friday: done

I was rather done today.  We did all our stuff because what else is there to do, but it was annoying.  But I also know that I have a ton of support here at home.  There's internet and our ratio of computers/screens to people is absurd.  (It's usually a bit absurd, but thanks to some loans from Hope College it's really absurd.  That also doesn't count the ones Ben brought from Gentex because he's only using them for work.)  The kids are really good, even if they are getting way too much time on screens.  (Math on the computer for an hour?  Sure...it doesn't really count as a screen, right?)  Overall, it makes me feel annoyed at myself because we have all the structure in place and I still am grumpy.  What about the people that don't have the structure that they need??

Joshua's lego challenge was to build a spider and a snake, both of which could actually move.

We picked up our crazy amount of groceries today.  Of course, I could only think of the things I forgot, like hot dog buns.  We are also out of muffin liners, so I might try using our silicon molds without the liners and see how it goes.  Isaac was able to get the cake mix and frosting that he's been asking for for several weeks, so stay tuned for a cake.

Thursday: lost

Joshua came in this morning complaining about his wiggly tooth.  (It started wiggling a bit less than a week ago.)  That's Ben's department, and Ben said he'd look at it when he got up.  Ten minutes later Joshua comes back.  Ben eventually got up and said it was almost ready but not quite.  At breakfast Joshua put way too much granola bar in his mouth but managed to get the tooth out.  He was so excited.  It's a good thing that Gov. Whitmer said that the tooth fairy is considered essential personnel.

Joshua was sleeping in the tent but the tooth fairy can't get in the tent.  So he put it under a pillow in his bed along with a note in case the tooth fairy goes to the tent first.

Isaac had a meeting with his class.  It's the first time they've tried this and it went better than I was expecting.  The students did a good job muting and unmuting themselves, so that helped a ton.  Isaac only went a little crazy at the end.

Joshua's challenge was to built a flower and flower pot, a ducky, or a person in a sleeping bag.  He put the ducky in the sleeping bag too.  (Does anyone have some challenge suggestions?  I have some from the internet but a lot of them aren't quite what I'm looking for.)

There was also a complex story that involved a carrot sword hidden behind flowers in case bad guys came.

Ben reminded me that I could use a blanket while teaching, so I used our zipper blanket.  It was much nicer.  Also, "teaching" was much nicer today...I gave them time to work on a small project but no one asked any questions so I was able to get some other school work done.

Wednesday: today

I went to the grocery store today.  We just needed a few things as we couldn't pick up our groceries until Friday.  (I placed the order on Saturday.)  Anyway, the two items that really caused me to go to the store were sliced cheese (I forgot to put them on the order) and tampons.  Since I was there I also picked up some yogurt, toilet paper (in case it doesn't come on our order), Mountain Dew, and fizzy water.  I'm going to be honest...I'm having a hard time going from groceries every week to groceries every two-three weeks.  I can't quite wrap my head around what we're going to need that far out.  I'm sure that I'd get better at it if I needed to do it for a while, but it's hard.  Oh, flowers were on sale and since I couldn't get them for Mom's death day I picked them up today.  Also, I was surprised at the number of people not wearing masks...maybe up to 60%.  It's possible that it's been all over my news feed because of the sewing aspect of it, but I really thought more people would be wearing something.

When I got home I found out that my boys had been turned into rocks and barricaded themselves in Isaac's bedroom.  They did a great job of it; I couldn't open the door.  So we had a late start to school, but it was nice because I was able to get caught up on a few house work things.

It snowed off and on today.  Not enough to play in, just enough to make it cold.  I was cold yesterday too and it was rather annoying.  When it's cold I don't want to go on the walk that I really should take.

Isaac made cookies for his life skill again.  He did a much better job.  He's also becoming less afraid of the oven.

Joshua made a dragon and a venus flytrap.  It's a bad dragon that breathed fire on the Venus flytrap.  I find it interesting how all his animals (unicorn, horse, dragon) look about the same.

Joshua also made scribble monsters for art.  They're trying to give you a hug.