We hope to fill in the gap at some point, but, for now, we'll pick up the story a week ago, when the lock-down became obvious...
After the suspicion on Friday, it was announced over the weekend that Monday was to be the final day of normal schools in the Island, and parents could decide whether to send their children in or not. We had planned to send them both in, but then the suspicion of a cough was on Orry, so we didn't in the end.
As it was, there were about seven children in, all social distancing from each other in the school. They put out all of the kids' stuff in the playground, in the hope that parents would come back and pick up what was theirs. It was a sad sight (and enough to set Cori crying when I sent her the pictures):
I wanted to take some of the bags for our friends who I knew wouldn't be in St. John's to collect them, but then it would be a question of contamination, so I left them there, forlorn.
The conversation on the parents' Facebook Group was that the kids wouldn't be back in school this year. Of course, no one knows, but it became the assumption that this would be so, and so those in the top year were especially sad never to see the school or their friends there again.
For our two, they were delighted to be at home!
This was them happily settling into their first day at home that Monday:
(Orry is here writing a list of things they could learn about in their new Home School).
It was my last day in the office, and it was dedicated to getting us all ready and packed up to work at home, which everyone was very excited about as I tramped in with the computer and other things:
That first day was quite relaxed, with the kids just having an extra weekend day, relaxing and doing their own thing, which for Orry meant finishing off his bear, which he'd taken upon himself to make (all on his own):
Tuesday 24th:
This was the first real day of Home School... sort of.
We know we're not really home-schooling them, because we, like everyone else, are entirely unprepared for this, so we're entirely making up how to do it! However, we realise that this is going to be more than just Short Term, so we know that we have to treat it like Home School in some sense.
The boys' diary report for the day is:
- Research
- Camouflage
- Maths
- Skype
- Dance
- Yoga
The research was into camouflage in animals, which they read from books and wrote out on paper before making pictures of camouflaged animals. Finn loved this and got really into it, but Orry kicked against the research thing, feeling a little lost for what to be doing, so he was allowed just to do pictures (and work on his booklet about the planets he'd started the day before), and lists, such as this one!
The Skype was the first time chatting to their grandparents in America for the first time in too long. It was a very pleasant distraction, and very easily arranged because, of course, everyone was at home and available!
The maths was a BBC computer game thing that they played on as we cooked, between yoga and dinner.
Dance was a recreation of what they do at school - someone leading everyone else in dance moves for a song or two. This was a fun way to exercise, though it was also an opportunity for the boys to be naughty/silly. Such are young boys!
The Yoga was this, which they knew from when visiting their cousins in America. It was a lovely thing to do after I came down from working in the spare room and before dinner:
Oshin had been in the habit of crying whenever his brothers left for school of a morning, so he was very happy to have them around for the day and had great fun with them both, especially Orry, with whom he loves getting up to all sorts of jeel:
A successful first day, and one which Cori & I were surprised went so smoothly!
Here are Orry's badges which he created - his & Oshin's ones:
Wednesday 25th:
For those who are interested, this is what my work area looked like in the first day or so (before papers & books started piling up):
Finn was very excited to check out the computer and to watch a video or two which I was working on!
Wednesday was when the connection between my work computer and home started to play up, which led me to give up on it by Friday and to only log on via the home computer or my phone. Very annoying!
Finn's chosen topic for the day was volcanoes and earthquakes. They read what there was in their books, they watched a video or two online, and the did some experiments with marbles and baking trays to make earthquake-proof buildings:
As you can see, Orry decided to do a collage version of a volcano, which came out looking ace, as you'd expect!
They also worked on a Duplo version of tectonic plates, which Finn explains here:
As the pictures of Oshin and Orry with the thermometer suggest, Cori's been taking Oshin's temperature, suspicious of his cough (which we admitted was symptom enough to lock us in the house). Cori used this as an opportunity to talk about graphs, by beginning to plot our daily temperatures:
She also did other sorts of graphs with them, which they both really enjoyed doing:
It is strange to think of how we would have failed to have copied easily in London, for want of friends close-by who we could have called upon to help us, but that problem is almost unthinkable here in the Isle of Man. Having declared ourselves quarantined, we were horrified to find the box of teabags looking like this:
Cori put a call out on her mums-mates' Messenger chat, and this arrived within hours!
This was about the last day where the shops were without strict controls of numbers and distances between people, so it wasn't too much of a problem for our friend this day, but things got more painful thereafter.
One of Finn's friends posted a video of them describing their Duplo creation in Manx, so Finn made this to post in response (apologies for the finger over the audio!)
Oshin had another good day, enjoying his beloved cars...
... and also chatting about things, like the birds on the roof opposite:
Another successful yoga session again, this time under the sea:
Thursday 26th
Their diary has:
- Maths
- Writing
- Room sort-out
- Dance
- Yoga
The writing was something suggested by Finn's teacher. Obviously, there was no warning for this, so none of the schools were ready. Each school is making the best of it they can in the Island, but the Bunscoill has it particularly hard as a key part of their education is through a language they children are now not being exposed to, Manx. They are having to do a lot of work now to work out how to make it work, but at this stage they were only beginning to offer suggestions of what they had been or were planning to work on, or the work they were to set. Some of this was handwriting and spelling, which they both got into.
It's not something which Finn enjoys, but he submits to it. Orry, on the other hand, loves writing and spelling, though the latter perhaps in part because he's better than his brother at it!
(Orry's spelling is indeed freakishly good - Finn's spelling is average for his age, but Orry's is much better - for a thing we've never working on with him or which he's never tried to learn; it's just gone into him. He's very lucky!)
The maths was partly from a dinner-table conversation of the day before when Orry was panicked/upset by not grasping what we were talking about when we did some algebra problems with Finn ("What is blurgh, when 3 + blurgh = 5?" etc.)
This gave me the idea of making this as I played with Oshin before starting work:
I was very pleased with this, and Orry was very excited to have a go on it and to explain it to everyone else. However, it was a bit too easy once he grasped the idea of it, so it didn't last long.
It is clearly a Week One sort of thing - I probably won't be putting that amount of effort in on Week Three!
The room sorting-out was actually a major part of the day, and something which Cori was rightfully delighted by at the end of it. Their books had been out of control, all over the place in their tip of a room, but the end of the sorting-out left it like this:
Oshin's nap was better timed for yoga this day, but it didn't really help Cori get involved at all!
Friday 27th
The daily temperature graph progresses:
Cori normally works each year with one of the presenters on the Lego Master Builders TV show, so she had the idea of having the boys make a Lego creation to send to her.
They started, very happily, by watching an episode about bridges:
They then began the build, as Finn explains here (in Manx, for the benefit of his mate who was asking what he was up to):
The day's other main highlights were reading in the new Book Nook in the room (which is indeed very cosy!), and Oshin weeing in the bath, much to Finn's horror!
I also recorded Finn's Betsy Lee poem, which he had been preparing for the now-cancelled Manx Folk Awards. The idea was to get it to the radio to play, but I was rather too late, sadly, but it is still good to have recorded, even if just for ourselves:
I also recorded Finn's Betsy Lee poem, which he had been preparing for the now-cancelled Manx Folk Awards. The idea was to get it to the radio to play, but I was rather too late, sadly, but it is still good to have recorded, even if just for ourselves:
Saturday 28th
It's strange to have a weekend where nothing is different - no one leaves the house, no one dresses different, not one does anything special. So we tried to make it at least a bit different.
The boys stayed in their pyjamas (every other day they choose their 'uniform' from their chest of drawers... which just means getting their normal clothes on), though, for Orry, this meant staying in his daytime clothes which he'd decided he wanted to wear to bed the night before!
We also decided that Cori needed to go and regain her sanity away from the kids, doing her tasks upstairs away from everyone. We said that it should be two hours, from about 9.30am or so.
In her absence we got stuck into an animation - the sort of thing Finn often asks for but rarely gets to do. We discussed the Buggane of St. Trinian's (a story they know anyway) and they got drawing.
Here is Finn's excellent tailor:
Inevitably, we never got round to making two films, but we did make Orry's one, for which we wrote a script, as his Manx isn't fluent enough to go without:
But he is fluent at reading it and, seemingly, understanding it, as you can see here in his excellent finished film:
They continued on their Lego bridge mostly otherwise, as Cori got stuck into her Fixing Box, getting everything in it fixed and back in action at last! (Her two hours was extended thanks to Oshin's nap around lunchtime).
She also got back onto fixing the Laaire Vane, which made a very strange sight drying outside:
But probably the main highlight of Saturday was an ice-cream delivery!
Davidson's have started doing household deliveries, which has seemingly been a great hit, amongst our friends anyway! We joined the gang, very happily!
We deliberately kept much of the weekday routine otherwise, as it works well for all of us, so we all had a dance and some yoga before bed.
The boys stayed in their pyjamas (every other day they choose their 'uniform' from their chest of drawers... which just means getting their normal clothes on), though, for Orry, this meant staying in his daytime clothes which he'd decided he wanted to wear to bed the night before!
We also decided that Cori needed to go and regain her sanity away from the kids, doing her tasks upstairs away from everyone. We said that it should be two hours, from about 9.30am or so.
In her absence we got stuck into an animation - the sort of thing Finn often asks for but rarely gets to do. We discussed the Buggane of St. Trinian's (a story they know anyway) and they got drawing.
Here is Finn's excellent tailor:
Inevitably, we never got round to making two films, but we did make Orry's one, for which we wrote a script, as his Manx isn't fluent enough to go without:
But he is fluent at reading it and, seemingly, understanding it, as you can see here in his excellent finished film:
They continued on their Lego bridge mostly otherwise, as Cori got stuck into her Fixing Box, getting everything in it fixed and back in action at last! (Her two hours was extended thanks to Oshin's nap around lunchtime).
She also got back onto fixing the Laaire Vane, which made a very strange sight drying outside:
But probably the main highlight of Saturday was an ice-cream delivery!
Davidson's have started doing household deliveries, which has seemingly been a great hit, amongst our friends anyway! We joined the gang, very happily!
We deliberately kept much of the weekday routine otherwise, as it works well for all of us, so we all had a dance and some yoga before bed.
Sunday 29th
Sunday brought more fun graph work, this time with the added bonus of using a measuring tape to measure how far everyone jumped:
Orry enjoyed the graph especially - Finn's had wandered off by that point!
(We've been surprised by Finn's poor attention/focus. It's not something we really see at home in what we do, but he clearly finds it very hard to focus for very long at all on anything. We had no idea that was a feature of him!)
Orry then moved on to do a bar chart - or, rather, a Block-a-Graph - counting the colours of the blocks which Oshin has:
During this time, Cori finished off the Laaire Vane, which was something she'd had on her To Do list for over a year. She was delighted! Orry was slightly frightened, Oshin was not, Finn was well trained to ignore the thing completely!
The older boys also got to do things they'd not normally be allowed to do. Orry's total-focus joyful task was painting:
It is lovely that he enjoys it as much as he does, but it doesn't half make a mess... especially if he decides to paint his own arms!
Cori joked with him in shock horror that the paint would never come off and that he would have blue hands forever, but he believed her and was immediately horrified so she had to back off it very quickly!
Finn's treat was to do Scratch, his programming thing. We had stored up some ideas during the week, so he leapt in to make a Chameleon which followed your finger on the screen, changing colour to the colour underneath it on the ground he'd prepared. This he did, amazingly, all on his own.
His other creation was the Earth and Venus circling the Sun. We had to look up how to do this and we were all delighted at the fix; the code was effectively; Move 10 steps, Turn to Sun, Turn 90 degrees left, & Repeat (which is a lovely way to create a circular path!)
Then the daily dance and yoga, before bed.
In between times Orry made this nice picture of the campsite at Wales - now such a long time ago, though only a matter of weeks!
And with that, Week 1 of self-isolation was complete.
By the end of it, we felt that we were doing pretty well; the boys were enjoying themselves (mostly), I felt more engaged and connected to family, Cori was finally getting on top of things - a very positive experience overall. Let's hope that the weeks which follow will be similar!
Here's the pretty Sunday sky out of our window to close:
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