Shout out to my COVID homeschooling moms! How's your week going? Sometimes homeschool is a well-oiled machine. Other times, it's the reality TV vacation series nobody really applied for--and you're pretty sure nobody's winning that trip to Aruba no matter how many alligator pits we all jump into.
What to do when you find yourself fighting the hump-day blues with a kid with a bad case of the wiggles? If your kids are like mine, you've basically got three options:
- "Pull the fire alarm"--yeah, just give up and call it a day. Guaranteed to "work," but the formal learning train stops somewhere short of the station for the day. There's a lot of things you can do that are educational in their own special way, but probably not anything that's going to help them on that imaginary test you're still thinking matters a lot at the end of the year.
- Pull out "Boss Mommy"--authoritarian may not be your style, but sometimes you've got to give this angle a try. I'd give it 1 in 3 odds at my house. Thankfully, once that fails, you can quickly drop back to #1, or, try my new favorite tactic--
- Low-key mumble, "Eh, maybe there's a LEGO video about that," and keep it nonchalant while your kids are suddenly interested, present, and sitting up straight.
Here I'm going to let you in on the COVID Homeschool Secret of the Year that I stumbled upon quite by accident, and why lately I find myself relying more and more on Option #3.
It all started with social studies.
Now I'm going to be honest, history and social studies are the highlight of my homeschool mom life, and it shocks me to no end that this is the case. My kids are kindergarten and first grade. According to the State, they have very little in the way of goals related to either history or social studies--which surprises me, because those were the backbone of all my son's kindergarten crafts back in the good ole' pre-COVID days.
But history and social studies are what captured my imagination as I wrestled with the overwhelming task at hand. As long as you've got the chance to teach your kids, why not teach them about the wonder that is the world they haven't seen yet? Why not teach them about the amazing histories and cultures that came before us and surround us, and all of the millions of fascinating people on the globe they'll never meet? I had absolutely zero intentions of getting passionate about being a teacher (indeed, the idea that learning to read was as simple as teaching rote mechanical phonics, was one of many notions I've been relieved of these last few months), but when I saw the opportunity to spend time teaching actually important things--well, I've got to admit, my inner nerd sprung to life with bigger than life plans to teach them EVERYTHING. To give them a chance to be the kids who nod in faint awareness rather than shrinking away from the unfamiliar.
And that's why we learn about holidays. All the holidays. Obscure holidays. Made-up holidays (well, maybe not made up, but one book from the library listed holidays that nobody's ever heard of). Every stinking holiday I can find, we have a lesson on. We watch festivals on TV--parades, services, memorials, everything I can find that might keep their attention. We get out maps and globes and books. We listen to the stories and traditions behind the holidays. Even as young as they are, we find interesting parallels in similar cultural narratives between our world history readings and the stories behind the holidays we encounter. The whole thing makes me weep for the lost hours I could've spent studying interesting things in college--but in truth I avoided history classes like the plague because I absolutely hate memorizing dates. What a shame.
Which gets me back to my kids' favorite holiday so far, thanks to a random video we ran across looking for some background to supplement some pretty dry library books. Let me tell you, this video sets the bar HIGH. You're going to be hard-pressed to find another video that is as well-done as this one. But that's ok, my kids to be honest aren't all that picky about LEGO videos. In fact, their standards might be pretty durn low. But believe you me, you show your kids The LEGO Sukkot Movie, and they're going to be begging you to build a tent out back for weeks.
And thus was born my secret strategy for getting through those humbling homeschool moments. You know, when you just don't think you can take another moment. That's when you search for a LEGO movie. They're out there. They're out there about just about everything. Today we saw a kid build a functioning electrical LEGO Diwali lantern, and some catchy Diwali-themed LEGO dance video that no human on the planet could keep from smiling at. These, after watching LEGO Moses float down the Nile for history class. Two LEGO lessons in one day? It's been that kind of week. And yes, the LEGO videos saved me. And brought on a flurry of hands-on, technology-free time after school was over. Because (really) what's another half-dozen half-finished LEGO sets sitting around my house these days? It's COVID homeschool time, and we're building the world and learning about the world without ever leaving the house. And as long as I've got social studies, history, and a video search engine, we're going to make it through 2020 just fine.
