Whatever U and I had last week, we decided to start quarantining ourselves, just in case. It could also be just a cold, however, we’re deciding we’d rather be safe than sorry (plus, we’ve been using the excuse to be super introverted this week (it’s a shame, really 😉)).

Please note: many of the links posted here are affiliate links, meaning if you purchase anything from these links, we will receive a small portion of that sale at no cost to you 🙂 Thank you so much for supporting our homeschooling journey!

Also, to keep our kids’s names confidential, they’ve been replaced with the first letter of their names 🙂 T is currently 6, E is 5, B is 3 and U is 1.

Sunday 3/8

Sunday was a day for the gaming books! We played Minecraft all. day. long as a family and it was great fun!

We all had different jobs – T was the idea guy and he was our main project manager. He’s crazy knowledgeable when it comes to creating recipes for building items, even down to the pattern that the raw materials need to be in to build the end product. He built armor and weapons and tools for everyone and built the workbenches and built our initial house. Then he mined with Dad and helped to bring in the resources while offering ideas of what we should do next.

E was all about beautifying the lot with flowers and also building the big house with me. She spread light with the torches, did fun designs with them on the walls and helped with odd jobs around the lot!

B mainly just was terrified of the baddies at night, so he didn’t do much, but he had fun while it lasted, haha.

Dad did the mining and fighting baddies and I did the building with E and some visionary stuff with T.

We had lots of cooperation, problem-solving, communication and we let the kids lead and teach us as much as possible 🙂 It was a strain for my own perfectionist-self, but it was a really fun day of working together!

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Monday 3/9

The kids had a nanny day and played outside on the playset, watercolored rainbows together and played computer games, mostly 🙂

Once Kelly and I got home, we all went on a walk around the neighborhood and then came home and everyone snuggled up and read together in the big bed before bedtime.

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Tuesday 3/10

Another nanny day filled with playing outside and getting some much-needed sun 🙂 They did a great job cleaning the house with Natalie and when Kelly and I got home, we all made a super easy Alfredo together with leftover steak from last night (we substituted half and half for the heavy cream, since we didn’t have any and added a little flour to thicken it up).

The kids made probably 85% of the dinner and the grownups went for a hands off experience. The only things we really did were cut the steak, onions and garlic and then dump the water out of the noodle pot when it was ready. Otherwise, it was pretty much up to the kids!

They learned some more kitchen safety (we leave the pot handle over the stove, not hanging over the edge; steam can burn us if there’s a rush of it), fractions with measuring cups and spoons, and we’ve been working on having the kids scrape their plates and put them in the dishwasher after dinner and lunch, which has been wonderful!

Our nighttime routine has also incorporated a lot more working together to make sure the house is tidy for the next day 🙂 This drastically increases Mom’s sanity levels.

Also, dinner was delicious!

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Wednesday 3/11

This morning was a pancakes with warmed berries and (finally) using up the remainder of my first batch of whey from our first batch of yogurt. Now only another half gallon to figure out what to do with! Maybe we’ll try lacto-fermenting something 🤔

The kids had a fun sensory and safety learning exercise with ironing kitchen towel/napkins. It was fun and therapeutic watching all of the wrinkles get eliminated! I got these Nutmeg and Golden Yellow cotton napkins from World Market and they were 6 for $10 (along with our $10 kitchen rugs in the last few pictures).

We also continued last night’s discussion of fractions (taught with measuring cups) by folding the towels into halves and then thirds.

B and I had another successful alphabet session! He knows all of the letters from A-E and almost all of them from O-Z! We’ve come up with some fun symbolism for the letters and drawn faces to help identify those memory triggers. An R, for instance, has a pirate head wrap and eye patch and is said like a pirate (“arrrrr mateys!”).

The kids are also signed up for Conversational Mandarin Chinese class for 5-8 year olds via Outschool (signing up through these links will get you $20 off your first Outschool class, also)! We’re excited about that, they love learning new languages and learning an Asian language at such a young age may offer them some foundational understanding that Germanic- and Romantic-speaking adults seem to lack when learning Asian languages.

They’re also dabbling in Korean (from their Taekwondo lessons), Japanese (because they’re ninjas, of course), Spanish (just for fun) and French (because I’ve been learning it myself). I’m sure they haven’t retained hardly any of it, but it’s been a great jumping off point toward learning about other cultures and world geography. We love Duolingo as a fun and free language-learning app that we all do together.

We did a little PE, walking to the mailbox and back (lunges and side squats on the way there, squats while I checked the mail, running back to the house (and we got our new Story Time Chess game, which we’ll hopefully get a chance to play tomorrow!).

We ended the day in the garden/on the playset and letting the bunnies out for a romp in the grass! The kids planted seeds with Dad and I weeded the garden. Then they brought a bunch of toys outside and experimented with shielding themselves from the hose using Captain America Halloween shields. They decided – after blasting each other with the hose – that the shields worked when the hose was set to mist, but not when it was set to jet 😂

Second bath of the day, reading in the big bed and then bedtime!

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Thursday 3/12

We started this morning with a find-all-the-library-books scavenger hunt. I think we have about 30+ checked out, so it was quite the ordeal! We took screenshots of the list along with the pictures of the books which gave the kids something to cross off as they found them 🙂 No fuss picking up ftw!

Then we had our great unboxing of Story Time Chess which I’m thoroughly impressed by! The kids have been playing all day, both inside at the table and outside in their treehouse. While T was in school for the week that we gave that a shot, B and E played chess at the little library and fell in love with it. B begged to play more after that, so I bought Story Time Chess as a way to make it even more fun and engaging for them 🙂

It comes with a storybook about all of the different pieces and why they move the way they do (the scared king who tiptoes one space at a time, for instance). They also have mini-games that the kids can play as practice and more stuff that we haven’t even looked at yet. 10/10 would recommend!

After reading a few chapters of the Story Time Chess and then playing chess together (we also looked up an online chess game (chesskids.com) for the third wheel who was waiting for their turn), we did chores – feeding the buns and the kitty, unloading the dishwasher, had lunch and then went outside for more gardening, bunny time and outside play.

I also broke down and officially ordered our Raddish Kids subscription (if you want to sign up, too, you can use the code h8833v for $10 off your 6- or 12-month subscription)! I’m really excited for that and to make a cookbook with the kids!

We’d also love to get a microscope (this is the one I have in my cart) and a MEL Science subscription, but I think we’ll wait on those for now 🙂

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Friday 3/13

Today was a lazy day after a walk in the (falling and not sticking) snow first thing in the morning 🙂 After that, we played chess and watched Super Wings for most of the day.

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Saturday 3/14

With the tax deadlines approaching, Kelly has been working over the weekends, so Saturday was mainly a working day, followed by some outdoor play and Fortnite together. Relaxing, reading up on COVID-19 updates and generally mentally preparing to be quarantined for the next 1-3 months (which, if I’m honest, my introverted self loves the idea of).

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