[Tea] Working from home? Schooling at home? Help is on the way.

Welcome to "Tea with Julie," a weekly missive by me, Julie Bogart. My wish is to give you food for thought over a cup of tea to enhance your life as an educator, parent, and awesome adult. Glad you're here. Pinkies up!
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Cincinnati, March 21, 2020

Hi Friend,

What a week! I'm exhausted and it's only day 4 of our confinement in Ohio. Everyone is going through a massive disruption to all our predictable patterns of living. I see you. It's rough! Because this is a new-to-everyone moment, we are taking a short hiatus from our scheduled topic to discuss how to handle the education of your children during isolation.

Whether you are a “homeschooler” or a “suddenly-at-home” schooler, the COVID-19 confinement period is daunting! No more soccer practices, piano lessons, or math classes. No trips to the zoo or park days with friends. We’re staring at the same four walls and they start to feel like they are closing in.

It’s especially challenging for “working from home” parents. Suddenly you need to provide an education while earning a living, under the anxiety of getting sick! I know a little something about that! I raised five kids—homeschooled them and ran a business at the same time.

All of us look for ways to foster learning and play. We don’t want to simply pacify our children while we hover over our computers. I hated it when my kids fell into the dreaded “wandering nomad syndrome”—kids who glaze over and complain that there is still nothing to do. I wanted them to be meaningfully engaged, and I wanted to get my work done too without feeling resentful of their reasonable interruptions or guilty for not being more attentive.

I have 3 tips to help you and your kids experience this season as a gift, rather than a punishment.

Ask them to help you make a plan

Include your kids! Hold a morning meeting where everyone discusses the plan for the day. Take their suggestions, jot them down, and include their needs and desires. Help them know that you want them to have a satisfying time at home all while you also keep earning money.

Ask them what they’d like to do while you are working.
Ask them how they’d like to resolve a conflict without involving you.
Ask them what kinds of foods you all can prepare ahead of time for them to eat that won’t require you to open boxes or pour drinks.

Consider using a timer to let them know how many minutes straight you will work before they can interrupt (barring injury!). When it rings, take a break with your kids. Touch base, see what they built or read or watched while you were working. Watch a movie or read a book together. Then re-up for the next chunk of time.

Kids asleep in bed are the least likely to derail you. If you have flexible working hours, consider getting up early (teens sleep in) or staying up past their bedtime (little ones can be in bed by 9:00). If you have a partner, work when that partner is on duty. If you are both working from home, swap who will be supervising the kids (try not to work at the same time—one can run herd in the morning and the other in the afternoon). Naptime is difficult to enforce with older kids but may be essential to your ability to work. Try audiobooks, music, and a box of books to page through that only comes out during that quiet time.

Keep it special

When national tragedy hits or a family member is stricken with an unusual illness, we remember that experience for the rest of our lives. Adults often feel the stress and anxiety at a more profound level than children. Our kids count on us to create for them a life of peace and meaning. We want them to remember this time as good even if it was uncertain and odd.

Working at home and providing their education is a challenge and can mean high levels of stress. For your work times, set aside specific:

toys,
crafts,
games,
or television shows.

Instead of all the toys being available, save some just for the working hours. Help your kids look forward to that time as a time of good stuff, not a time of taking you away from them.

For instance, is there a LEGO set that they can only construct when you are working? Are there coloring books or tangrams or modeling clay that only comes out when you need them to be happily occupied? Save certain television shows or video games for your work time. Or, if your kids are old enough, a lengthy board game is a perfect way to help kids stay immersed in an experience while you work.

Fold academics into play and parties

Don’t panic. Fold learning into your meaningful activities. Now’s the time to play all the board, video, and card games. Reinforce math skills with dice, cards, Monopoly money, and Battleship coordinates. Trust that you are helping your kids think about strategy and calculations, predictions and percentages.

If you worry about your child losing precious time to grow as a writer, consider the timeless art of freewriting. Create a little writing support group as a family.

Set a timer for 3-5 minutes.
Pick a word out of a hat or pull a quote from a book, or write about any topic under the sun—everyone, parent and child together.
Let yourself go, writing as fast as possible, without worrying about punctuation and spelling.
Enjoy the catharsis of self-expression.

In Brave Writer, we have a 7 Day Writing Blitz you can download for free to help you play with words and grow your young writers. You don’t need a lot of writing in order to grow as a writer.

Read to your children, ask them to read to you. Throw a poetry teatime! Set the table for tea and treats (even cinnamon toast works!) and read poems to one another. If you don’t have any poetry books, print poems from the online poetry anthology called the Poetry Foundation.

Learning at home is different than school. Our lives wrap themselves around the learning. It comes from a more organic (and often more memorable) place. Everything can teach anything, and anything can teach everything, if you have the heart to see it.

Check out our page of free resources and a link to our free online conference next week. Susan Wise Bauer is joining me plus a slew of other awesome presenters.

Keep going! Keep working. I’m rooting for you.

Warmly,

P.S. Catch up on all the “Tea with Julie” emails here!
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