Quite a successful first day of school at home for term 2. It’s amazing the necessary collusion of child/parent/teacher/technology and with any of those four bits missing, nothing really happens at all.
The Queensland minister for Education (whose name, it turns out, is Grace Grace) was reported to have said last week that parents should not have to be teachers and that the online teaching should happen between children and their teachers.
Well, I can tell Grace Grace that that certainly wouldn’t work in our house. Perhaps she was referring to high-schoolers. Or perhaps she’s never had kids. Or perhaps she just says whatever suits the party line and that party line says that parents should easily be able to work from home and have school-age kids working from home at the same time (because that’s better for the economy).
Personally, I am relieved that I never took on a paid job. I spent the whole school day right beside one or other of my kids. P helped out in the morning with some Maths which was lovely of him because he does have a paid job (obviously).
After lunch, the kids and I headed out to do “Boot Camp” as suggested on the year 1 timetable. Turns out my boot camp muscles have had much too long a holiday. Ha ha ha. We all agreed do only one of the three minutes suggested for each activity. There was much huffing and puffing and groaning and giggling through each session. Even so we all trooped in feeling terribly virtuous.
Meanwhile, even so, the chickens still needed to be cared for, people needed meals, the washing got forgotten when the machine finished its cycle unnoticed, and the cat still demanded food in the middle of dinner preparation. My amazing little six year old has decided he wants to be a chef and was determined to help me with every facet of getting our evening meal. He peeled sweet potatoes, dug the seeds out of half a pumpkin, cut up fingers of sweet potato, potato, pumpkin and beetroot, learned how to pick the heads out of the mint in the garden and then persistently chopped and chopped it and added it to the peas. What a star!
And the meal was thoroughly enjoyed by all, along with entertaining conversation.
Out of the Cave 