Home Schooling Wk2: Assessment

I realized that I accidentally didn't plan for all five days but as this has been wearing on me, taking Friday off from actively directing the kids in their learning is not a bad idea. Implementing a regimented schedule works pretty well. It helps that I still have a pile of math worksheets. They're beginning to run a little low so I'm going to have to start writing them out soon. I'm not exactly looking forward to that.

The act of spreading a lesson out over the week in 20 minute blocks is working really well. I got the boys to write 'mini-essays' of 2 paragraphs on the social studies topic that they were working on this week. I typed them up and e-mailed them off to the teachers to let them know what we've been working on. I'm trying to coordinate what I'm doing with what the teachers are working on. The teachers have been surprised by this. I fail to fully grasp why they are surprised and then Beloved reminds me that I'm looking at this from a teacher/educator's perspective. Most parents aren't.

Speaking with the school, they're struggling to get everyone the resources they need and get all the teachers trained on the platform they're going to be using for distance learning. (Thankfully, it is not Blackboard. That is one buggy platform and has been for as long as it has been around. I remember it having a lot of issues when I was using it for college classes. People I know who are presently teaching on Blackboard are still having problems with it, I can only assume the student end of that interface is just as buggy.) The boy's teachers have been in contact with me and doing their best to figure out how to get this new system up and running as quickly as possible.

Where other parents are frustrated because they have no idea what to do, I am frustrated because I hate writing lesson plans and I don't have quite all of the resources I want to use for helping the kids learn while they are out of school. It's a luxury apparently to have internet or some form of a laptop. I find it interesting that this is luxury where we are. We're not in a big city but cable is pretty common in this area. Maybe it is the fact that we're not spending our money on other luxuries and this is the one we use. I don't know. But, as long as we have the internet and I can bash together some kind of lesson, I think we'll be ok.