Before I start, I do want to be sure to say that I don't think you have to come up with a plan at all. Some people I know will be happier to take things day by day as far as any structured learning activities and others will be happier just enjoying a nice long spring break. I don't think there are any right or wrong answers in this situation, and think that different families will all have different ways of coping that work best for them. But if you are looking for some structure or ideas for a plan, I hope this helps!
First I'll share what a typical homeschooling day with no outside of the house activities looks like for us. We don't have a set schedule exactly, but more like a loose outline. It's too hard for us to stick to an actual schedule because babies and toddlers complicate things, but an outline at least gives the bigger kids a sense of what's going to come next. I have found that the more you try to structure your day like a typical non-homeschool school day, the more you will frustrate yourself. There are so many disruptions and distractions when schooling at home, it's just easier to stay flexible!
We start our school day over breakfast. For us it's an easy way to get some reading done without too many interruptions since everybody is occupied eating! We do poetry, Bible, and memory work at this time, but any reading out loud would be an easy thing to do. After breakfast we clean up, get dressed, AM chores, all that good stuff.
Once everybody is dressed and chores are done and the baby is either down for a nap or up for a nap and fed (depends on the day right now because we are at the mercy of the 4 month sleep regression) we start our big chunk of school time. We always start with a gross motor activity because it's really hard to go from playing with your toys in your own house to doing schoolwork immediately. We do something called Swedish Drill which is basically a formal Simon Says, but in the past we've done freeze dance, stretching, skipping around the room or house, or red light green light across the room.
Once we are finished some sort of movement, we settle into the sit down work. I have out puzzles, books, or sometimes a fine motor activity for the little guys (I have a whole post about homeschooling preschoolers and toddlers, check that out here), but mostly they just play. I try to alternate independent work and one on one work with the big kids, but sometimes they'll need to wait for me and then they go play.
The breakdown usually looks like this:
-Phonics lesson with Kate/Sam copywork and 1 independent reading
-Kate copywork/Sam narrate independent reading and 1 reading and narration together
-Kate reading and narration together/Sam math lesson (we go over it together first) and mapwork, history timeline, nature journaling, or drawing
-Kate math lesson (go over together first and map, timeline, nature journaling, or drawing/Sam reading and narration together
-Repeat same sort of thing for whatever is left
Over lunch is when we often do music and art appreciation study and in the afternoon we do more crafty things or go outside or nothing structured and just play.
Everything we do follows our curriculum, but there are some aspects of it that could be easily adapted for temporary homeschooling. In particular:
Copywork- We start copywork with just the alphabet. I write it out on primary lined paper and they copy it out slowly and neatly underneath. Then we move up to words and eventually sentences. I pick the sentences from their poetry books, but you could choose them from any books. Sam right now either does copywork that I have chosen or he chooses a couple lines from one of his books and copies them straight out of the book. When he's doing copywork that I have chosen and already written, he covers a few words at a time with an index card as he writes them down. This helps him with spelling. Copywork helps with handwriting obviously, but also sentence structure and punctuation without having to really drill it. Next year Sam will start studied dictation, which is something else that could easily be used in a temporary situation. I will choose a short passage from one of his books and he will have the week to read over it and get to know it (including punctuation) and then at the end of the week he will write it out as I slowly read it. Any misspelled words will go onto a spelling list and any missed punctuation will be highlighted and worked on.
Narration- Our curriculum is literature based, so we don't have textbooks. I read out loud from a history, science, geography, etc book and afterwards they orally narrate back to me what I read to them. The science behind narration boils down to the fact that telling information back after hearing it helps lock it into your brain. Sometimes for fun they'll do a drawn narration. Next year Sam will start written narrations. It's sort of a gradual lead into learning to write essays. It can be done with any book that you read to them or that they read to themselves. It's a really good brain exercise for everybody! Sometimes when I'm reading a heavier book I challenge myself to narrate it back to myself. It's hard! But it really does lock the information in there and makes your brain work in a different way while you read, organizing everything. I try not to ask any leading questions before they narrate. Just simply, "Can you tell that back to me?" or, "What can you tell me about what we/you just read?"
Mapping and timeline- Keeping a big map and a history timeline is a really fun accompaniment to any reading that you're doing. A timeline especially (we use a big long piece of paper, but you could just use any notebook with each page showing a hundred years) is super interesting! It's cool (and often surprising!) to see which historical figures actually existed at the same time. After we read something about any historical figure or event, we write it on our timeline and mark it on a map. Just a good way for kids to get an idea of some basic geography and a sense of how the passage of time works. Before we start the history timeline (end-ish of 2nd grade-ish), we do a personal timeline and they just mark what things happened in their own life in what years.
The advisory board who created the curriculum that we use created an emergency curriculum plan several years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It has many free resources and ideas for homeschooling through an abnormal season of life. I'll link it here.
Some other great resources:
Librivox- free audiobook versions of a lot of titles, particularly older books.
Libby- app that connects to your library system so you can borrow e-books and audiobooks
https://www.myteachingstation.com/ - good resource for printable worksheets. I like to laminate them or put them in a plastic page protector so the kids can use a dry erase marker and use them multiple times
Hoffman Academy- online piano lessons. Their full program costs money, but they do have a free program as well.
https://afterthoughtsblog.net/2016/07/beginning-swedish-drill-videos.html - this is a blog post that explains the Swedish Drill (structured Simon Says) that we use to start our school day
Some social media accounts that I like following for inspiration and ideas (most are on both Instagram and Facebook) I'm going to type their names with spaces to make them easier to read, but on Instagram obviously you'd need to take the spaces out:
TheDadLab
Play at Home Mom
Modern Miss Mason
Learning Well
Charlotte Mason IRL
Home Ed Printables
The Conscious Kid
Read Aloud Revival
A couple other companies offering free resources right now (I think there are a lot more, but these are 2 that I've heard of today that I can vouch for)
Logic of English they are putting out a series of new videos in the next few days that will be free for the duration of all of the closures
Pinterest is also a wealth of information and ideas. Craft ideas, fine motor skills ideas, printables. I have quite a lot of homeschooling related pins on my Pinterest organized into boards by subject. You should be able to find me on there just by searching my name!
Here are a couple other blog posts I've written about our own homeschooling journey.
Lastly, if I can, I want to offer some slightly more personal advice. Don't stress yourself out about it. There's going to be a different dynamic between you and your kids than there is between them and a teacher. There's going to be more tension and awkwardness because the whole world is tense and awkward right now and kids are feeding off of that. It's really okay to stop a math lesson smack in the middle because you're at each other's throats. It's okay to leave it for later that day and it's also okay to leave it for another day. It's okay to say, "This just isn't working today." and go outside instead. Or watch a movie. It's okay if that movie is a Nat Geo documentary, but it's also okay if it's not. It's okay if you have a schedule and stick to it and it's also okay if you just leave books and paper around your house and let them do with it what they will. And it's okay if you do both of those things over the course of a week. Homeschooling your kids, whether it's for a month or for 13 years, gets to look like whatever you want and need it to look like.
I'm here to talk anytime ♡
