This week, Washington has been getting more and more cases of COVID-19, so we’re opting to stay home as much as possible and to try to stay sane amongst all of the scary news stories.

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 3/15

Sunday was a day of cleaning the house and weeding the garden 🙂 The kids played outside, we planted tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and spinach (I’ve heard great things about Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, though we haven’t tried them yet!) in our Costco egg cartons (we also bought a TON more here, as well as 4″ plastic pots and gallon plastic pots that we’ll be able to reuse next season, too) and we all played Fortnite together. Then baths, reading and bed! Easy, lazy day as COVID-19 quarantining begins (though we’ve been basically quarantining ourselves for the last week or so already).

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Monday 3/16

Today, we helped Kelly’s co-worker with childcare which ended up being loads of fun! We started the day with everyone outside, playing on the playset (this is the one we have and I’d love to get one of these!) and chasing each other around the house.

The kids all played Fortnite together after that and after a lunch of grilled cheese, grapes and salami. What was extra special today was that T and C have played and audio chatted online together, but have never met in person, so it was an extra fun reunion of sorts!

We all went outside to garden and play again, I finished weeding almost all of the garden boxes (yay!) and my next project will be to dig up the trees out front so that we can plant our fruit trees instead 🙂

And with all of the generosity going around, we ended the day watching/listening to Josh Gad on Twitter (Olaf, LeFou) read The Giving Tree, which was super special in a purely-human kinda way.

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Tuesday 3/17

This morning, T had his first Chinese class from Outschool (this link will get you $20 off any class you’d like!)! He had a great time and learned how to say, “Hello, What is your name? My name is T.” (Nǐ hǎo, shénme míngzì? wǒ jiào T).

After Chinese class, we watched Kung Fu Panda and Guardian Brothers and discussed the differences between various Martial Arts and their origins (Taekwondo is from Korea; Ninjas are from Japan; Kung Fu is from China). Guardian Brothers was more about the mythology of China, though I was too tired to do much of a discussion about that.

We also looked up what a typical Chinese breakfast looks like, which is generally a much less sugary breakfast than what we have in the US! Most of it is chicken, noodles and rice dishes; congee; or – what we attempted to replicate by making thin omelets – crepe-like egg pancakes.

After our Chinese itch was thoroughly scratched for the day, we took a walk to a neighbor’s house to get some four-leafed cookies from Half-Pint Farm (at which point I remembered that today would have been an excellent day for an Irish lesson, haha) and got to look around our neighbor’s mini-farm! They have Nigerian goats, a Kunikuni pig, a mini cow, a wallaby (what?!), a chicken and I feel like I’m missing something, but basically they have the cutest farm ever.

We finished the day by playing Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, which is a fun little card game that plays a bit with your brain! The kids practiced saying a word while looking at a different thing (i.e. you might say “goat” aloud while you put down a picture of a pizza) and then reflexes (i.e. when a narwhal is played, you have to slap your hands together above your head and then slap the pile of cards). It’s an easy, entertaining game that the kids can play by themselves or that we can play quickly as a family!

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Wednesday 3/18

Yesterday we got our first Raddish Kids boxes (you can use the code h8833v to get $10 off a 6- or 12-month subscription if you’d like to try it out with us)! I ended up also ordering the Spring Brunch single kit and today the kids made Lemon Poppy Scones, but without the poppy seeds (because we don’t have any), without the icing (because we don’t have powdered sugar) and without the lemon zest (because we forgot to put it in, haha). #closeenough

After and during the cooking process, we watched Sugar Rush on Netflix and talked about baking as a profession! We brainstormed and dreamed about having a baked goods stand at the end of our driveway to sell cookies and such to neighbors who are driving and walking by. We talked about what other things we’d like to bake and cook, we learned how to pre-heat the oven, how to use a pastry cutter and practiced using a knife safely and the kids got to use their very own whisk that they got in their Raddish box 🙂

The scones turned out tasting like scones, haha! I bet they would have been amazing if we actually used all of the ingredients that we should have used. After baking, we went outside and played/gardened for a while, then came back inside to play another new game: Scram, which ended up being a great game of addition practice for E and logic practice for T!

When Kelly got home, we pulled up a tree from the front yard in preparation for our fruit trees! We have a Honeycrisp, two peach trees, two cherry trees and a Japanese plum tree that I’m excited to plant (we got them all at Costco for like $15!)

Miraculously after that, we still had the energy to take a family walk around the neighborhood 🙂 Then picking up the house and reading some Magic Tree House before bedtime!

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Thursday 3/19

Today was T second Outschool Chinese class and they continued learning how to say “Hello, what is your name? My name is T.” They used stuffed animals (T brought Pikachu, Bulbasaur, and Squirtle) and the kids all used Zoom to introduce each other to their stuffies. Super cute!

The last time we went to Costco, they were ALL out of the normal oatmeal that we typically eat, so we got steel cut oats (which B and I loved, but everyone else hated), so that was what was for breakfast, haha.

T and E played Minecraft together, while I gorged on COVID-19 news. T was super proud of himself for finding 27 pieces of iron ore in Minecraft, so we looked up what real iron ore looks like and then real iron ingots. That was neat! And this is a neat video of Minecraft block vs real-life blocks side-by-side 🙂

The kids played outside multiple times (it’s been so sunny and beautiful out this week!) and when Kelly got home, we pulled up two more trees! Only one more to go on this side of the yard and then two final ones on the other side. The yard is looking great!!

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Friday 3/20

This morning we had another thing that was definitely *not* our normal oatmeal (that everyone except B and I hated, haha) which was Cream of Wheat, BUT! It led back into our iron discussion from yesterday 🙂 The kids were amazed that cream of wheat had the same kind of iron in it that we mine in Minecraft. Minds blown.

After breakfast, we drew with chalk outside in jammies! That lasted for a while until U started making mad dashes for the road and wouldn’t let up. So, back inside to play some Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza and Fortnite for a while.

T has a friend who he plays Roblox with and other friends who he plays Fortnite with, so despite our lack of in-person friends, he’s been able to talk and chat with his online friends, which has been nice.

I introduced him to another game called Epistory today, too, which is a game that you beat by typing words. Thus, we have typing class as well as vocabulary (most words are words that he doesn’t know, which led to discussions about what they mean and making connections to other words and places where he’s heard of those words before (marigolds and walnuts, for instance, are used in Plants vs Zombies – we looked up photos of real marigolds and walnuts). The game also tells a story of the heroine as you play it and the words remain on the map, so he’s able to read and re-read the story as he plays along. Ultimately, it’s an amazing game for gameschooling!

Tonight, we finished pulling up the last tree and then let the kids stay up late and played Fortnite together as a big family 🙂

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Saturday 3/21

This weekend, I allowed myself to go out for the first time in about 2 weeks to our local Urban Farm Store (which is AMAZING – it has everything you’d need for beekeeping, soap making, fermenting and brewing, cheese making, animal husbandry, mushroom growing, gardening, etc etc. – it’s my guilty pleasure store and I kept my hands in my pockets basically the entire time I was there), a local game store and Papa Murphy’s.

I got to look at ducklings (which I pine for) and I got us some more board games for next week! Since we’ve been going through so many games, I thought we could keep up on the gameschooling thread, all while supporting local businesses through this crazy time.

I bought Catan Jr., Ticket To Ride – My First Journey, Outfoxed and Sleeping Queens, Guess Who, Battleship and Zingo. Such a great haul and I’m excited to dig into them all!

The first game we dug into was Catan Jr, which T LOVED (E hates it because she always gets the goats, which she doesn’t realize isn’t a hindrance at all, actually, haha).

Otherwise, we relaxed today and I’m sure we’ll be playing lots more Catan Jr. tomorrow.

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