It’s me, Deanna, the teacher with 20+ years experience who, like you, is practicing social distancing at home with my child. I have decided to use my training and experience to develop a daily list of activities for you to do at home with your kids.
Note: I have been doing more to support teachers in my board as they are supporting their own students. This means I have less time to work on these posts. But feel free to look at previous ones for inspiration. I am also going to start slipping in some suggestions for teachers as I know these blog posts are being shared by teachers.
Today we have two “off-beat” holidays: Laundry Folding Day and Take a Walk in the Park Day. So I am proposing two separate activities. Laundry and Taking a Walk.
Laundry
I have been a big advocate through all of this of teaching your children to do chores, to incorporate housework into their day. Today, focus on the task of laundry. Even a young child can help with this. Have your toddler to sort socks by colour. Older kids can find matching socks and you can teach them to roll them.
Older children can be taught to fold and hang laundry according to your family’s preferences. Or, if you want to be adventurous, have your teenager research and apply different folding methods to see which one works the best.
Take a Walk
Many parks are being closed because of people not obeying the social distancing recommendations, but I still want to stress that you need to get some exercise in spite of that. Go for a walk with your family. If there are local parks and green spaces still open, go there as long as you can stay away from other people.
One of the ways we’ve been passing the time away in our walk is by geocaching. Geocaching is a modern-day form of orienteering where caches are hidden in very specific geographic locations. Those locations are then inputted into a website or app. Users can then use an app on their phone to help them locate the past. Now we have not been touching the cache, given everything that’s been going on, but we take pictures of what we find. We make sure to also log those finds on the app. There are lots of caches all across the world, many in easy to get to urban locations. This might be something for your family to try.
Deanna Toxopeus is a teacher with 20+ years of experience teaching students from Grade 1 to Grade 8. She is currently an Itinerant Teacher of Assistive Technology with the OCDSB. The opinions she expresses in this blog are wholly her own.