Demoted And Exhausted.

When it was thought the kids were only going to miss 6 weeks of school, some resources for continued learning were sent out by the teachers, but there was no actual required work that needed to be completed. Things were mostly left up to us parents to decide what our kiddos would do....have 6 weeks off of doing nothing, make up sheet work for them to do, have them work out of books or online, or a combination of it all. The parents were essentially the teachers, and I charged head first into that role. 

Now that it's been confirmed that the kids will not be returning to school for the remainder of the school year, much to all of my kids' disappointment, teachers are starting to send out work that is required and will be graded. 

And just like that I've been demoted from teacher to teacher's assistant. 

I'm not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, it takes out all the guess work for me. Now I don't have to create the work and try to figure out what they should be doing, I just enforce the lesson plan sent by the teachers and assist as needed. I like not having to create and plan the actual school work. However, on the other hand, I feel like this way creates more work for me! Before I could just slap a math paper down in front of a kid, help as needed, and then correct it with them. Done. Or have them watch a video and answer the questions. Done. But now I have done nothing but juggle a million emails from a dozen teachers for 3 kiddos, keep info straight and a timeline set for each kid, print stuff, take photos of stuff, scan stuff, upload stuff, send stuff back to the teachers....yikes....am I a secretary now as well?  

I am truly, utterly exhausted from all the back and forth and overseeing of work completion. Not to mention housekeeping, cooking, animal care taking, and overall normal kid-care. I am pooped. Seriously pooped. Do the kids really need to eat 3 meals a day!? Good Lord. And why is there SO. MUCH. LAUNDRY!? Hell, I didn't even get in the shower until 2 the other day because I was so dang busy! At the end of the day I am more than ready to plop myself into bed. 

Anyway. I digress. 

One of the many assignments that came in this week for Anthony from his teacher's was to create some type of workout plan in our yard with things we had around for PE. This quickly became Molly's PE assignment as well, and even Timothy joined in to send to his PE teacher! 3 PE assignments completed with one task? Perfect. 

Behold, the homemade obstacle course! It's not extremely long or very detailed, but for a quick PE assignment, it's a great start. Maybe we'll expand on it in the future. The kids really enjoyed doing it, and I enjoyed the break for email and paper work! 

So first, you start out on your bike at the beginning of the driveway. You ride your bike down to the cones. You get off your bike and run zig-zag through the cones. Next you jump rope for 30 seconds, followed by 5 vertical log jumps. Then you've got to try to throw 4 footballs in a plastic bin. Finally, you wrap up the course by sprinting as fast as you can to the finishing cone. Boom, done. 

Anthony was up first. 

Next up, we've got Molly. 

 

Lastly, Timothy!  

Great work, kiddos! One week of official school work down. I think 8 more to go? Heaven help me. We got this. 

With love,
Mama Hauck