Start of week 3 of Social Distancing

Today starts our 3rd week of social distancing and truthfully, so far so good. I have found I have extrovert tenancies at school and church, but once home my family and I are pretty much homebodies LOL. Only 2 big differences-- not being able to see my extended family and eating inside restaurants. Luckily, we live in a day and time that I can video chat with my family and have done some drive by's to say hello.
I am very glad that I have been able to keep up with my twin sister---she works in a dental office and is deemed essential and I watch her daughter while she is gone---so she is in my quarantine circle. I don't think I could do this without her!

My girls have been doing well playing together. The weather has been amazing and I feel our family has truly grown closer together over these last 3 weeks. I know God has a plan for all this and that He is with us through this storm. I honestly have felt very much at peace through all this chaos---and I can only point to Jesus as the source of that peace.

I ended up created an online Facebook group to stream my Facebook Live Circle time videos---I am shocked to have over 160 members!! I am glad to be able to reach out to our community (both my school kiddos and neighbors and others in our community).

I am trying to keep our circle time as "normal" as possible---we do a weekly letter and number, word families, memory verse/Bible lesson. I tried to add extra videos of read alouds and directed drawings too! This is definitely a first in our nation to have distance learning on such a huge scale. I haven't yet received any updates on what my oldest daughter (2nd grade) should be doing so I have made our own "schedule" or list of activities.

School at home is very different than in the normal classroom. One major difference is your class size. Instead of 16 four year olds, I have 2 (my youngest and my niece) and instead of a class with 20+ second graders, I have one. Having mixed age groups brings its only challenges but we are making the most out of it.

I created two activity jars: one for my 2nd grader, and one for the younger two. Inside each jar are many slips of paper---on each paper I have written different activities. For my oldest some of the slip have things like reading, art projects, American Heritage Girls badge requirements, online learning apps, Google Classroom assignments, journaling/writing, Brain Breaks/dancing ,etc  For my younger ones, ABC Mouse, coloring, pretend play, legos, playdoh, etc. I tried to create a variety of things for them to do, both academic and just fun. They get to pick a slip out of their jar (gives them a choice) and then I set a timer. For most its between 20-30 minutes but if they are enjoying the activity I let them go until they loose interest (except for TV time. This seems to be working well for them but we will see how it goes this week (our first real week of using our activity jars ).

You can follow my Facebook Online group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/241372353677500

I am also working to upload the videos onto Youtube.