School at Home Should Be at Your Pace – Rest & Create

In the midst of all the turmoil in the world it is very important to take the time to rest and let ourselves be.  Especially, if like me you are suddenly involved with another four hours a day in study time for children, where you have to school at home.

“You don’t always need a plan.  Sometimes you just need to breathe, TRUST, let go and see what happens!”

– Mandy Hale

In my case, in a language I do not speak or read at an academic level – it has been an interesting and occasionally stress-filled school at home time.  Needless to say, I am learning many tricks to translate all the data to English, learn the lessons in English and then once we understand the details of the lesson we are translating back to our target learning language to answer all the questions and send the corresponding answers back to my children’s teachers for marking.

We have a very large case of “Perfectionist, please meet your children”. Not one of them will operate on a schedule.  Not one of them ever managed to follow any plan that I worked on for hours, planned and researched till I was exhausted, and was enthusiastic to implement during our school at home time.

“What do you do?” I hear you ask…. Well, panic and mayhem were the order of the day for a long time. Until I learnt a valuable lesson…

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year in conversation” – Plato

I had taken the fun out of learning with my scheduling and research. In my panic over the possibility of missing something, I had failed to recognize, I had left nothing to chance. No space for investigations.  No space for thought without an outcome already being known. No space for play.

Find New Ways to Learn

My having missed the mark significantly was summed up neatly whilst learning about volcanoes, when my daughter says, “Mum, we have talked about this till there is nothing to talk about, drawn about it till there is nothing more to draw, when do we get to make the volcano?”

Right, make the volcano… make a mess in my kitchen… for me to clean up mess-in-my-kitchen… eek…. I am thinking “How about, Never! Never works for me!’ Then my daughter pipes up again, “I saw this baking soda with vinegar experiment that they did, online.  The mum made the volcano down her kitchen drain because it is really good for cleaning out the drain.  Then you just turn on the cold water tap and it all washes down the drain to clean it! Wouldn’t that be neat?”  Wait a minute…. Clean my kitchen drain with a science experiment about a volcano…. I can get on board with that!  “Please tell me more?”

This was how I learnt that over scheduling, over planning and over stressing were taking the joy out of learning. I needed to step back and “make a time” as opposed to “make time”.  Here was where I had to prove to myself and my children that we were worth more than adherence to a schedule that was making everyone frazzled. It was time for a rest!:

Time to make muffins and declare it “all school work complete for the day”.

We covered maths (measuring ingredients), science (Learning about oven temperatures and how ingredients mix together),  literacy (reading the recipe) and geography (where did the food come from?). Oh, and don’t forget the tea, hot chocolate and candle for the table when the muffins are ready to eat!!!

Let me leave you with this quote:

“Have regular hours for work and play.

Make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well”

– Louisa May Alcott