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Like me, many parents will be trying to balance working from home and home-schooling their children. It’s not easy, but this is my journey so far!

I am used to working from home, so for me this part is normal. But it has now been almost two weeks since the schools closed and it already feels like it has been a whole lot longer than that!

When it was first announced that the schools were closing, I was terrified. I had no idea where to begin teaching my children; the curriculum has changed so much since I was at school. How was I going to be able to manage both?

I had a vision we were going to create a new routine:

  • Up at the normal time, dressed & breakfast as though we were going to school/work.
  • Our at home school will start at 9am and consist of work set by the school & online activities – we will cover the whole curriculum.
  • They will learn life skills, cooking, cleaning etc.
  • The boys will be so busy, I will be able to work as normal.

In reality, my vision was in tatters by 11am that first Monday morning. Although both boys had been provided with some work from school, it wasn’t a full school days worth. The online activities I found that I thought they might be interested in, kept their attention for 20 minutes at most before they were asking for something else to do! They had also seemed to have lost all their confidence. My youngest had to choose two spelling activities from a list (something he has done since P1). He ended up in tears as he couldn’t make a decision!

This wasn’t going to work, I had done virtually no work and we were all getting irritable and stressed. We needed a new plan!

I realised that for the boys this was a much bigger change to their lives than it was for me. I still had some normality with my work, but they had nothing that was familiar; school was closed, clubs and activities closed and they couldn’t go out to play. I needed to cut them some slack and let them adjust to the ‘new normal’. We took a step back and tried to work out together a way that we could make this work for all of us.

Now, our new routine is something like this:

  • I get up and start work around 6.30am, so I can have some quiet time to get on before the boys get up.
  • The boys get up & dressed around 9am and take turns to make the breakfast for us all.
  • They do the school work that has been assigned through google classroom/glow throughout the day but have breaks to do other stuff. These are a few of the activities they have been enjoying:
    PE with Joe Wicks
    BSL Sign Language with Natasha Lamb
    Fischy Music assemblies
    Coding
  • The one that didn’t make breakfast makes lunch for everyone
  • They also get time to do whatever they choose, which has included: baking; doing science experiments from the horrible sciences kits we have; building meccano; watch something on the Discovery Channel. Other times they have helped with jobs around the house/garden.
  • Some days I set little challenges like: we got lots of potatoes & leeks in our veg box delivery this week, other than potato & leek soup, find a recipe that we can make for dinner. Another challenge for my older son was to come up with something that we have at home that could be used to make kettlebells for his new garage-gym.
  • We also take time to do our daily outdoor exercise. The boys sometimes go out for a cycle or we go for a walk.
  • Some days they also help or make dinner.

For us this is working. The more chilled out approach and not thinking that we need to be busy sitting at a desk doing maths and English has made the boys happier, and I am getting more work done. I do worry that they could be falling behind, but I am sure they will catch up with this when school does eventually return. So, for now I am trying to let them have fun, learn new life skills and enjoy being at home. For me, this means that I can get work done but also spend time with the boys during these difficult an uncertain times.

This approach won’t work for everyone. We are all different, we all learn differently and we all work in different ways. You just need to find what works for you as a family and don’t be too hard on yourself all we can do as parents is our best.

More useful tips from Outside The Box during Coronavirus