You CAN Teach Online and Homeschool Your Own Children!

Last week was my first week of distance learning. I was required to meet live, using Zoom, with my homeroom class and all 5 of my social studies sections! My husband, who is also a teacher, had multiple professional development sessions each day, as his district prepared to begin distance learning this week. On top of all that, we have a 5-year-old daughter. Needless to say, our house was CRAZY! My Zoom sessions suffered multiple interruptions, as did my husbands PD sessions. My daughter was crying out for attention that we couldn't give her. We downloaded a learning app we thought would help and, while she loves it, she is not used to having that much screen time and we experienced some major meltdowns when it was time for the iPad to be put away. Before the week was over, I was defeated. I felt like a bad teacher and a bad mum. I was convinced that I couldn't teach online and homeschool my own child.

My husband and I had a heart to heart on Thursday evening. As I sobbed, his brain was working on a solution. We are both middle school teachers, so figuring out how to homeschool a 5-year-old has been a challenge for us. We know her attention span is significantly shorter than the students we work with, so she would need multiple things to do during the time we have to meet with our classes.

So, my husband came up with a list of activities and organized them into STATIONS!

I don't know why we hadn't thought about that before.  We both use stations in our classrooms and I know my daughter's teacher does too. We gave her a timer she can set for each station, no more than 5-10 minutes per station, and then she can to move on to something else. The new stimuli at each station helps hold her attention long enough for us to teach a class or listen to a PD session. You could also include some physical education between the stations. For example, hopping, bear crawls, or frog jumps, to the next station.

Below is a list of the stations we put together:

Letter Practice:

In preschool, they had been working on writing upper and lowercase letters. So, we wanted to continue with that. You can find some print and go worksheets here: Letter Writing Practice A-Z

Number Practice:

Number recognition is something my daughter excels at. She has surpassed pre-k and kindergarten benchmarks already, so we decided to include word form too. You can find some print and go worksheets here: Number Writing Practice 1-20

Building:

(Includes an affiliate link)

For this station we used Paul Bunyan Logs , but you could use any type of building toy you have. Building toys help with your child's fine motor skills. 

Art: 

(Includes affiliate links)

This little girl just loves to be "creative", so we included multiple opportunities for her to do that. She really enjoys making patterns with her Spirograph, drawing pictures for us, and making Play Doh food. We spaced these stations out with letter and number stations in between.

You could also add in a technology station. After the problems we had last week, we decided to take a break from technology. After we have a chance to discuss parameters for technology use, we will probably add this too. As we continue with distance learning and homeschooling, I am no longer terrified of failing my students or my daughter.