As millions of school age children transition their education to home classrooms in the wake of the devastating COVID-19 global pandemic, Schmidt Ocean Institute has assembled a wealth of free online science resources for parents and teachers.
Key things this week I think have been that I have lowered my expectations and increased my flexibility, when it comes to timings etc and who does what when.
We love climbing frames and wooden swing and slide sets, and we’ve seen so many benefits from taking the children to different parks over the years. Every school holiday we spend a day doing a tour of the local parks, and we try out at least one that we haven’t been to before.
This is a strange and unprecedented time in our lives. Families all over the world are in lock down. Whilst this might be a really difficult time in so many ways, it is also an opportunity to do things we might not normally have time for in everyday life.
I’ve also been trying to remind myself that this is not home schooling in the sense that home-schoolers know it. This is crisis schooling and that is NOT the same thing. No one has done this before and we’ve had little time to prepare.
Family life is hectic. We race from place to place, club to club, meeting to meeting and we keep going, sometimes for weeks at a time without taking a breath. Without pausing to reflect on the impact that can have over time.
Congratulations. You are about to have a baby, or the little one has already arrived. You are likely to feel overwhelmed with lots of different emotions, and you worry that you will forget to look closely at this special time. It is reasonable, therefore, to want to find a way to celebrate the birth of your child.
What strange times we are living in at the moment. If you’d said to me a year ago, even at Christmas, possibly even a few weeks ago that parents across the UK, across the world, would be homeschooling their children, in a bid to support social distancing and limit the spread of COVID-19 – well, I’d have thought you were crazy.