After a very long discussion about the current state of the world and the immediate future, J and I decided to pull Arthur from public school and homeschool this year. We did not make this decision lightly, but feel like it is the best one for our family right now. We’re hoping that next year things will improve and we can send him back to public school for 2nd grade.

Once we decided, the hard questions came. What do we teach? How do we teach? What do we buy? What is this going to look like? What about Quentin? These and many more questions arose…

To start off, we’ve been doing some informal weekly unit studies since school shut down in March. The school closing was very abrupt and remote learning did not offer much for Arthur to continue learning. Through no fault of his teacher, we were just given a few basic math and language arts worksheets plus a few class zoom calls. Lots of frustration! In April, I started thinking about unit studies to give our weeks a bit of structure and routine. We were foreseeing lots of closings and most days in the house. And thank goodness I started planning early! For 11 weeks now, we’ve started most weekdays with a few language arts and math pages and moved on to videos, books, activities, and projects related to a broad topic. We’ve covered:

• Art History - including our own versions of Starry Night, prehistoric cave paintings, and Water Lilies

• Ancient Greece

• Farms

• Space and Planets

• Aesop’s Fables and Fairy Tales

• U.S. Geography

• Fourth of July (American Symbols, Revolutionary War, etc)

• Rainforests

• Moving West

• Ponds, Lakes, and Rivers

• Bugs and Bees

These simple unit studies have kept Arthur (and even Quentin) engaged in learning something even when we’ve been stuck in the house. Most of our materials came from googling free resources online. The library opened back up for curbside pickup of holds only in June, so we’ve been utilizing that every week for read alouds and nonfiction books on the topics. I bought a few things here or there, but mostly have kept our expenses near $0. This plan has been working well for us, but August is going to be a different beast to tackle.

Research and decisions coming soon in Part 2…

Next up on the TBR pile: