Finding Family Rhythms in the Middle of Pandemic
Coronavirus has changed the landscape of how we work and how we learn. Today I’m sharing four tweaks we’ve made to our daily lives that have helped us find a new family rhythm in the middle of this pandemic.
Life’s gotten real weird, real fast, for the entire globe.
I have lots of thoughts about lots of things, and probably even more questions, but the one thing I am absolutely certain of is that this new way of life is going to have to be the new normal for longer than we think, and longer than we’d like.
Our family has been homeschooling for the last six years, and before we started our family my husband and I worked together. We’ve had to adjust schedules and responsibilities and priorities often over the last fourteen years, and we wanted to share a little hope and encouragement to those of you who are now working from home together and/or homeschooling for the first time in the middle of the worst pandemic our country has seen in anyone’s lifetime.
Someday soon, I hope this article will be completely irrelevant. But in the meantime, here are four tweaks we’ve made to our daily lives that have helped us work together, homeschool, and stay sane.
1. Designate drop zones.
Learning can happen anywhere at home and so can work, but it is extremely important to designate a space where everything “drops” when work and school are over for the day.
For our family, each of our boys has a file box that contains their specific workbooks, worksheets, and notebooks for school. They can complete their assignments anywhere they’d like in the house, but at the end of the day they are expected to file their papers and tuck their workbooks away in their box so all of their assignments can be found the following morning.
A friend of mine bought small rolling carts from Michaels for her girls e-learning supplies. My sister bought the same cart to hold all her work supplies as she transitions to meet with clients online. My husband has set up shop in a corner of our basement.
Don’t feel like you have to reinvent the wheel, or make drastic changes to your space at home. Your drop zone could be a closet, or a milk crate, or a cubby on your bookshelf. Just know where these new things in your home space will go so there is a physical boundary between work, school, and home.
2. Make the day’s expectations clear and visual.
For the last two school years, I’ve been writing my boys’ assignments for each day on a white board. This definitely includes school for our 5th and 3rd grader (noting what they can complete on their own without my help and what they need to wait on for my instruction), but also details what chores they are expected to complete before the end of the day.
Our goal is to end the day with an empty board.
Because the day’s expectations are clearly displayed, they can take initiative to work on their assignments at their own pace, and get the satisfaction of watching their progress. Plus, it eliminates needless questions and whining about how much more school they have to do, or when they can play LEGOs, etc. etc. etc.
This helps me in so many ways as a homeschool teacher. One, I know what they can do without me and can quickly direct them to those assignments when I need to work with another child, and two, it helps me know how to plan my day. It is less about getting math done exactly at 10:05, and more about working through the unique challenges of each day with a concrete goal in mind.
Plus, it gives me so much joy to SEE our progress as assignments are knocked off the board.
3. Communicate concrete scheduling needs, and then remain flexible with EVERYTHING ELSE throughout the day.
I’ve seen so many social media posts of now-homeschooling parents trying to manage life by creating a strict daily/weekly chart for everyone to follow at home, and I am not surprised they very quickly degenerated into meme’s mocking the effort.
There are certainly things that need to be scheduled and communicated to the family, like work calls and school zoom calls, but I would like to strongly suggest holding the rest of your plans loosely.
Schedule portions of the day based on who needs to be where (Dad has a zoom call at 10AM so we can’t be in his corner of the basement), rather than on what needs to be done (Math MUST take place at 9AM EVERY DAY). Understand that “the schedule” will change from day to day – and that is completely OK. Use the day’s clear and visual expectations (as outlined above) to drive your day, and if you need to provide slightly more structure, take a first-then approach (First we will do math, then we will do history).
Less planning in this season of life generally means less stress – and I’ll take cuts to my stress any way they’ll come.
4. Work together toward a DAILY fun goal.
We’ve been stripped of pretty much every extracurricular activity there is besides going to the grocery story (which honestly wasn’t all that much fun under normal circumstances), and it can be really hard to stay motivated to do the hard work of our at-home jobs, or at-home education without a little incentive.
Maybe it’s a movie or special TV show. Maybe it’s time on the iPad. Maybe it’s a family game night or FT call with a friend. Maybe it’s a walk, or a family LEGO build. We ALL need to be working hard toward a fun DAILY goal in order to keep doing this.
We broke down and bought Disney+ for the duration of this stay-at-home order and we are watching the Star Wars movies in order. Our kids know Dad’s going to be working, we’re going to be doing school until a certain time, and then it all goes away.
Whether we are finished or not.
Obviously, we want to be working diligently. Obviously, we don’t want to get behind – but if there is nothing fun that we are working towards right now, it’s going to get real hard to wake up the next morning and do this all over again.
Hang in there.
Someday life will be normal again and this season will be but a distant memory. In the meantime, stay safe, stay sane, and stay well.