Recap of Day 1 of Coronaquarantine

School's Out For... Corona 

Hello from the Beall compound!  I'll be using this platform to try to keep our family connected and involved in our little world over here.  Hopefully everyone is doing well and is practicing social distancing.  Once more for the folks in the back!  SOCIAL DISTANCING!  Flatten the curve.  While I love Italy, I don't want to become the next Italy.

Things we are doing for our sanity:

setting up a schedule

Bennett is a kid who loves schedules, structure, knowing what to do next.  He spends his days at school- 7:30ish to 5:30ish, enjoying Right Club mornings and afternoons.  We are trying to follow a loose version of what his first grade schedule looks like.  He's used to doing something all day.  If this seems overscheduled, and maybe it is, but we're being pretty easy going.  On Mondays, he has chess before school, so we tried to keep that same schedule, too.  

Of course, it was a bit of a challenge to keep up with his schedule and actually still work myself.  With construction slowing down and furniture deliveries getting postponed, all I could really do is reports and budgets.  As of today, my office is still "business as usual" and working from home needed to be approved.  With the confirmed cases of Covid on campus, you would think that my work would be a little more forwardly proactive like everyone else's employers.  Brad's company instituted work from home Monday afternoon.

schedule, but make it fun

We're trying to make sure that we have fun too.  Some of Bennett's favorite foods are avocado toast and eggs.  And we had the stuff to make it!  Still have all the fresh fruit and veggies.  Hoping we don't go on lockdown!

We also had time scheduled for movement.  Day 1 included taking a walk and a couple of GoNoodle and Zumba Kids youtube videos.  It was sleeting outside or just generally cold and wet most of the day, so we kept the walk short and even took a picture waving in front of his buddy's house to text over.

if we can't get out of the house, let's go around the world

I had the idea of having a social studies theme per week.  I let him pick a city in the world as the theme, and he chose.... Xi'an, China!  He based it on the episodes of PBS' Samantha Brown Places to Love episodes on our DVR.  She's fun and quirky, and I've always enjoyed her travel shows.  In this episode, we got to see the terracotta soldiers, which we have both been fascinated by.  For whatever reason Samantha gets her ears cleaned in a public park.  It's a thing there, I guess.

I've already sourced some links and he's created a worksheet that we'll use for other cities in other weeks (I mean, we've got at least 4 weeks of no school).  Each day we will explore different things using websites, Google Earth, and whatever else we can find.  He's got categories for population, food, geography, landmarks, and many more.  I can't wait to see what we learn.  The only problem is that we always end up hungry when we look at other cultures' food!

So if you've made it this far into this blog post, thank you.  I'll be sharing some of our adventures in quarantine, so check back, set alerts, and we'll see you back here!  These are going to be iphone pics, largely unedited, because I will never post if I tried to be as much of a perfectionist as I actually am.  It's hurting me inside, you have no idea.  I'll see what I can do for tomorrow.

Stay healthy everyone!

xoxo,

michelle