A Day in the Life of a Parent Homeschooling
GiGi’s Playhouse Hillsborough Parent and Board Secretary Andrea Maio shares her adventures in homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic.
How to survive home-schooling, please don’t give up your loved one with Down syndrome needs you more than ever!
Day 1:
8:00 am= How difficult would this be? Let me go over the homework folder (100 papers?) Oh no… No problem, I got this!
8:30 am= How do I organize the school day? Let me open the Chromebook and review the assignments requests. OMG, how do I get to Google classroom? Where are all the assignments?
9:00 am= One of the 10 emails received to track attendance says the assignment is due by 12pm. What? Where? By the way, home working was never so difficult. I need to attend the 9am meeting with a critical customer. Ok, I got this; I’ll start again in one hour.
10:00 am= I found the day structure in one of the assignments. I’ll make it visual for my son o understands.
11:00 am= Here we are on the third assignment of the day. Tobi crying asks: “why are we all sick, I don’t want to do school work at home, I’m sick”
12:00 pm= End of the home-school day. Lots of stress, half of the work done for school and little accomplished for the office. Feeling like giving up… No way, I need to make it work, at least 2 more weeks. Ok let’s think…
Sounds familiar?
Having a son with Down syndrome is very rewarding though it can challenging sometimes. Now, this is definitely new. I never imagined being a teacher and here I am, trying to teach my high school teenager literacy, math, social studies, and science all in one morning.
I invested most of my afternoon designing Day 2 to succeed, motivate and accomplish more than Day 1. First, Tobi needs to understand a little more about this Coronavirus situation and feel safe. We are preventing from getting sick so we are staying home and he needs to do his homework. Secondly, he needs to have the routine and structure he has at school. Lastly, this all new situation needs to be compatible with my full time job.
Hands on!
First, I need a visual way to share what is going on with the Coronavirus situation. I found a great resource shared by the CHOP Trisomy 21 clinic (COVID-19 and Down Syndrome Updates). In the section: How can I explain the coronavirus to my loved one with Down syndrome, I found the link below to be very helpful
Secondly, I need a token board for motivation and visual accomplishment with timing to keep track of the assignments. In addition, I set up alarms in a tablet with the starting and ending time of each period to help in the transitions. Although, I created my own board (happy to share if you want), there are some good resources shared by Michelle, a Special Ed teacher, that could be very useful.
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/FREEBIE-Star-Theme-Token-Board-4172684
Lastly. my husband and I arranged our work schedules to be compatible with the home schooling schedule, so we divided some of the periods for each of us based on our knowledge strengths. Team work!
Day 2: Nailed it!
Do you have some great tips & tricks? Please share them in the comments section below because we are all #StrongerTogether!
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