3 tips to help you survive teaching during a quarantine
and helping your own child at home.
Are you in survival mode? I am almost 40 years old and have been teaching for 17 + years and the only time I encountered a disruption in my education was when I was in 8th grade and my teachers went on strike! We ended up going to school that year until we legally were allowed to which was June 30.
My birthday is June 16, and I remember how excited I was to celebrate my 14th birthday in school. I thought that might be the case this year as well, celebrating my 40th birthday, but unfortunately, we aren’t going back to our classrooms at all. So here we are living our “new normal lives” in the year 2020! We are all staying home, teaching remotely, and helping our own kids with their school work.
It is A LOT!
I’m here to share 3 quick tips with you on how to make every day a little bit easier for you and to help keep your sanity in check. No, it is not easy and I’m not claiming that they are brilliant tips, but they are tips that have helped me in these past few weeks while I’m staying at home.
With that being said, let’s discuss the elephant or should I say ostrich in the room shall, we? Have you ever stopped to think for a minute about any time in your life that you have used the following words so frequently?
- Social Distancing
- Quarantine
- Coronavirus
- COVID-19
- Distance Learning
- Teaching remotely
I mean those words alone are a part of our everyday vocabulary at this point and we just need to embrace it or we are going to go crazy!
3 tips to help you survive teaching during quarantine,
and helping your own children at home.
Tip #1: I know this is going to seem like a no brainer, but wake up before your children and do your own teaching work that needs to be done ASAP! We all know your children are not likely to wake up early! Well, maybe some of them have internal alarm clocks but in my experience, our bedtimes and wake up times are resembling summer vacation!
So while your children are sleeping, now is the time to respond to emails, do your lesson plans, whatever needs to be done for that day, do it while your child is still sleeping! If you have small children who are your alarm clocks then wait until it is their nap time, so you can work without interruptions.
This will also help you if you are sharing devices because then you can make sure you have all of your important work finished before they have to do their own school work.
Obviously, it isn’t going to be possible to get all of your work done in that time frame. In most cases, you are going to be meeting with your classes at scheduled times. During these online meeting times, make sure your child has a snack and/or drink, and something to occupy themselves to help avoid interruptions. On that note, don’t beat yourself up if your child is spending too much time on You-tube or Tic Tok. I promise you they will be ok! We will all be OK! 🤣
I’m not going to lie I get interrupted about 1000 times per day, and I probably got interrupted 500 times while I was writing this post! However, if you try to minimize what your children are constantly asking for then it will be much easier to get your own work done when you are on a scheduled time frame. My favorite thing ever is that you can always tell them to get it themselves if they are old enough!
Tip #2: All of our own children and students are all out of sorts. Our entire lives have been turned upside down. We can hardly understand it for ourselves as adults, let alone imagine if we were a child. We want our children and students calm. If we remain calm then that should help them too.
Since our children are just getting into the routine of being at home and having mom or dad as their homeschool teacher, doing school work can start to become an issue. My own children are good students at school, but at home, it has been a work in progress!
When you say its time to do their math, they will obviously not want to do their math! So make it into a game! Set a timer and get busy! Let’s say they are playing with their legos. Set a timer for 10-15 minutes and tell them that when the timer goes off, it is time for their math lesson! 9 out of 10 times they are more willing to start their school work because they feel like they had a say in what they were doing. After their math lesson, I make my girls read for a half-hour in total silence. No TVs, no Ipads, no phones, etc. They all go off.
The house is silent and that is when I read too or I try to schedule their reading time when I have an online meeting I have to attend to.
Since you are an amazing teacher and parent, you my friend have just created a routine that will help your children do their school work and you did it all while they didn’t even notice. Parenting win in my books!
Tip #3: Remember to have fun as a family. It may seem like pure craziness right now, but I promise you we have been given a gift that we have never been given before and that my friend is TIME! Time to do whatever you want to do, obviously within reason of course. No, you can’t go out and meet your friends or have playdates with other children, but you can pick 1 thing to do as a family each day.
Our favorites have been movie nights and themed dinners. It gives everyone something to look forward too even if you have been together all day! My oldest daughter has been cooking and helping me more than ever around the house. Use this time to teach your children something that they wouldn’t typically learn in their classes at school.
So there we have it, my top 3 tips to help you in this crazy time we now consider to be our new normal. In case you were skimming along here is a summary of the 3 tips:
- Try to do your most important work when your kids are sleeping.
- Create a routine for when your own kids are going to do their schoolwork.
- Have fun as a family!
These 3 tips have been helping me during this time of working from home, trying to do school work with my daughters, and trying to tackle a never-ending to-do list!
What are you doing at home to help you work and help your kids with their school work?
Leave a comment below because I would love to hear from you!
PS. Need help motivating your math students? I have 5 of my top secrets just for you! There is also a bonus secret! SHHHHH!
Make sure to also head over to my teaching resources page to check out all of my resources available. Just click on the image and it takes you right to my Teachers Pay Teachers store!
Talk to you soon!
Love, Robin
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