We are only 45 minutes into our day, and I am already ready to say we are done. But it is my job to keep him going. My daughter has not made a peep, but she knows that her teachers were putting work up onto Google Classroom today so she wasn’t as excited as other days.
Luckily, today is PE day for my son. So after our morning recess, we will be doing PE, get out and let him work out some of his energy. This can sometimes help, and I know for some of us it is not always a possibility. But even for us adults, fresh air and a break from the same four walls can be a great reset for our own attitudes.
Sometimes watching nature can be a calming piece in our day.
Post walk, and some snack…
As we started to work in the lessons I put together, and being a bit worn out by his 2 mile bike ride, he is engaged with his learning. Starting with a video, then moving to three questions I have written out using our google drives. These questions can be used either as a quiet alone piece, or as something for us to use to talk together, where he is sharing what he has learned, or what other questions he might have about the topic. Then we move onto another video that requires him to use the information from the first video to “interact” with the second video.
I will admit, this takes time to set up. It is what teachers are trained to do. We find a theme and we build lessons around the theme, building skills and knowledge, utilizing the learning through multiple skills and content. Now, I am not an elementary teacher, but I have sometimes been very jealous of their ability to work through a day hitting all sides of a topic from different perspectives. As we shift to middle and high school, this ability starts to disappear. There are programs out there that utilize thematic units across core content areas. And even fewer that then blend them into electives and other non-core classes. But this type of learning is the best.
I think as parents we sometimes don’t realize that we have the opportunities to do this often. Today on our walk the ponds built to help with water run off were full. There are a series of them, they flow from one into the other. At one of them there is a dam like structure, and you can hear noises that sound like electricity running in wires (like overhead wires). So we stopped to talk about why the structure was there. I asked if he knew about hydroelectricity. He said he did, and he explained what he knew. So we looked at the structure and the structures around it and determined how they might be “harnessing” the energy from the water. Then we looked at the other ponds to see if we saw similar structures. There were no others, however we did note that they all had aerating structures in them. And we talked through why they would want to do this.
Every time you ask your child to explain something to you, you are building their thought process. You are engaging them in conversation. Both of these are life long skills that children need to build and grow. Every time you work through what you see with them, even if it is just your modeling your thought process, you are helping them see how other people work through a problem to find a solution. These are amazing moments as parent teachers.
We will make it through this!!!
