Quarantine Day 8: Cursive, Lego Challenge, Watercolor, & Virtual Family Game Night

It has been a week since we've been self quarantining here at our house. It has been a strange week, but it has felt kind of like vacation at this point. So far we have been keeping up the routine I had put in place on Monday and we haven't run out of food or killed each other.  I can't stress enough about how much we love cosmic yoga! This is a fun way to get moving in the morning.

Today the girls worked independently on the workbooks that Grammy got them for most of the morning. If you are a parent and need school activities for kids, I highly recommend the Brain Quest Workbook for kids. My 2nd grader and pre-schooler love the activities in them. Yesterday Naomi taught herself cursive with the cursive section in her book and has been writing only in cursive ever since! Their is a wonderful math section and Naomi was excited to see that it has multiplication! She is very excited to learn this. Juliet likes the mazes and learning about telling time and coin values. I never intended to be homeschooling while recovering but it has been fun seeing my girls love of learning and helping them with it!

Lego Challenge #1: Rollercoaster

I'm pleasantly surprised as to the warmth of community sharing ideas to keep kids engaged in learning from the school, teachers and companies. So many people have stepped up to share ideas for all age groups on all kinds of subjects. Museums are hosting virtual tours, teachers are sharing amazing videos they have made for their students and companies are putting out resources and fun challenges for students.  One thing I found online was a 30 day lego challenge. The girls are trying their first challenge today: building a new rollercoaster for an amusement park. Hopefully this will be something we continue to do in the coming weeks!

28 Day Drawing Challenge | Day 1

An activity that was sent to me by my colleagues is the 28 day drawing challenge by the Brooklyn sketchbook project. I have a sketchbook in their library collection that I made before we had kids, but haven't had time to do their project since having children. Now that I'm home recovering I'm going to build the drawing challenge into the kids and my day. The first challenge was: Under My Bed. The second challenge is 'House Plants.' I'm hoping to do this with the kids once they are done with their lego challenge. They are playing so nicely together I don't want to interrupt!! But the dining room is ready to go with watercolor once we hit the wall with legos!

As Massachusetts has declared a state of emergency, the open meeting laws have relaxed and we held our first school committee meeting via Zoom today. I'm glad that we can continue to have meetings and for me to be in my pajamas while doing so! This is going to be the new norm for a while. We met as a department on Monday this way and tonight we have a virtual game nigh scheduled with Uncle Dave and Alex and Nana and Baba. Uncle Dave has the game Just One that we are going to try and play. We also ordered Battleship on Amazon to play with Uncle Dave and Alex virtually and JP just found out that we can play Dominion online. Look out Uncle Matt!! Seems like everyone is trying to make this crazy situation more bearable for all.

The kids finished their lego challenge and transitioned to watercolor painting. I had set up the dining room for this. They love sitting and working and playing with this paint and using mom's professional supplies. This medium is quite fast though, before I had started my first drop of paint the kids had finished two paintings and wanted more paper! If this continues to be a go to activity I'm going to have to make a bulk order or watercolor paper!


After we finished painting it was 'free time' for the kids. JP and I took a walk with the dog as the weather had cleared and it had warmed up. It was nice to be outside! We ran into a few neighbors and it was weird speaking to them from 6 feet (or more) away. But everyone has been really good about social distancing!

This evening we played the game Just One via google hangouts with Uncle Dave, Alex, Nana & Baba. It took us a bit to figure out how to get everyone on the video chat, well mostly Nana and Baba were the ones that it took a bit get on the call, but we figured it all out! I think Naomi had fun but the game was a bit over Juliet's head. Maybe next time we can do charades?! And when battle ship arrives from amazon on Tuesday we're all over that!

Pratt Family Game Night - Virtual Just 

Now that the kids are in bed the adults are going to play virtual dominion with some of the Briggs' clan and then JP and I will continue our movie marathon of the MCU in order. Tonight it's Thor!

28 Day Drawing Challenge | Day 2 House Plants