The Coronavirus Homeschool Diary: Day 2

Well, would you look at that! We survived two days! We kept occupied, learned some stuff, had some fun, and live to give it a go for another day before I go back to work on Friday. Smalls did say she missed school a little bit, and Bigs said she missed her friends. But they’re both still enthusiastic about school at home – for now.

Our Rebel Girl story was Ada Lovelace, so we talked a little bit about computers, and maths, and what it must have been like to calculate things and live our lives without computers… or electricity… or even lighting like we’re used to. Or calculators! Once somebody orders more than four things in the canteen I’m all like uhhhh and slide the calculator over to sheepishly tot it up as my mind’s gone terrifyingly blank. I do wish I did numbers better.

We started with the first two maths worksheets in the Eddie Woo Magical Maths book, which was a number file about themselves (how old they were, how many livers they had, that kind of thing), and a page about odd and even numbers.

The video of the day was this one was about abacuses, as the girls didn’t know what one was, and this quick one on Ada Lovelace, which showed pictures of the machines she was working with – and some of her mathematical code that looked extraordinarily impressive.

Then it was diary time, and Bigs even drew a rainbow-coloured abacus which was super cute. I love to see what they take in as interesting or important, and then want to share. Smalls literally just drew a picture of herself and then wrote “MAC AND CHEESE” really big across two sheets of paper.

When they had finished that, I asked them to pick a book they’d read recently and answer these questions:

• Why did you like this book?
• Who are the main characters?
• What happens in this book?
• What is one problem the characters have, and how do they solve it?
• If you were to write a book like this, what would happen in it?
• Draw the book.

Bigs finished fairly quickly, so I asked her to write down the sub-plot of her book too.

After recess was art – we learned about Jean Miro from the Draw Paint and Print like the Great Artists activity book. Jean would often draw something with his eyes closed and colour in the resulting shapes, so that was their objective. Simple but effective!

This is a good video for kids about who he was and the type of art he made.

We had free time before lunch. Well, they had free time. I just tried to get through as much of my neglected work as possible and really didn’t get very far at all.

Lunch included a play outside and some minecraft time.

After lunch they completed an activity that was related to one of the things they wrote yesterday that they wanted to learn about. Smalls had to find a picture of Australia and draw it in her book, labelling the states and the capital cities. When I checked it and asked her conversationally what was the capital of WA or what state Adelaide was in, she could answer them. She was surprised, and very proud of herself. She ended up being able to answer every capital city and every state.

Biggie had to find a kid-friendly guide to staying safe online and copy it out into her book. We chose this one from Kids Helpline and she did the first half.

This is also a helpful interactive guide for younger kids.

Necessary doggo play break.

Then they watched an episode of The Expanding Universe of Ashley Garcia on Netflix, about a young girl who moves across the country to work for NASA building robots. Smalls did come out halfway through and ask “why do we have to watch this weird show? it’s weird”, before asking if she could watch Pup Academy instead.

So that is where I’ve left them. And it’s where I’ll leave you too, hopefully safe and well (and full of lentils, no doubt). See you tomorrow.