Quarantine Homeschool Day One

Homeschool While Working From Home

Chapter 1

Well, it's the end of the first Quarantine Homeschool Day 1. Let's start off with some positivity. It was good to see the girls' teachers and their classmates. Zoom has been working very well for staying in touch during distance learning and luckily, I have years of video conferencing under my belt so no stress there.

In fact, here are my top 3 things to know when using Zoom.

One

How to Mute All Participants as the Host
Every teacher will learn this by the end of Day 1. Go to 'Manage Participants' and Mute them. Mute them ALL.

Preschool Zoom - Mute is key!

Two

How to Touch Up Your Appearance While On Video

I have rosacea that most video conferencing software looooves to enhance (especially Google Hangouts). Let Zoom take care of it and apply a filter that will soften your features and enhance your natural beauty.

Three

Apply a Virtual Background

It's taken me years to curate a decent wall behind my desk to serve as a video conferencing background. Skip that step entirely and select or upload your very own virtual background.

I had lots of fun this morning making them this morning in Canva.

Here's one of them:

Zoom was structured, Zoom was great. The rest of the day? Pure chaos. Not because the state or school district isn't prepared, but because in order to keep my 2nd grader on task I would need to be able to manager her at least every 20 minutes. Do you know how many meetings I had scheduled today? 11. This means that I have to zip in and out of internal and client meetings to attempt to manage the day of an 8 yr old and keep a 4 yr old out of trouble. Day 1 was nearly impossible. We all made it, but I can't say we checked everything off on the list. We're doing the best we can and learning every step of the way.

Here's one more tip I'll leave you with. I hope your young learners will find it helpful and remind them of school days.

My 2nd grader has come home with plenty of these writing prompts with pictures. When she sat down with this to work on today's prompt, she knew exactly what to do.

Hoping this download helps you too!

Click to access the pdf

After Hours

By the time school was officially over at 3:30, I still didn't feel like we hit everything we should have on the list. Too much time was spent going through math problems on IXL and not enough time was spent on all the other items on the list. To add to the frustration, I had a full day of back to back meetings so in the seconds in between I tried to manage homeschooling for 2 kids while my husband, who also works from home also had many meetings.

After an exhausting day, we had a Walmart schedule grocery pick up for 6pm. Brookie cried the whole way there when I told her we couldn't go inside because of the virus. By the time I went to bed, my eyes were just burning with fatigue. Here's hoping tomorrow is an easier day!