Hacking the Virtual Schedule

Two weeks before my first grader’s first day of school, I received an email with his virtual schedule. My eye immediately started twitching.

At this point, most parents are in the same boat and we’ve been bailing buckets of water out of it since March. School start dates have become as flexible as our remote work dress codes, and it’s likely we’ll all be doing at least a few weeks of virtual school facilitating. For early elementary schoolers, that means logging on, queuing up live meets, printing worksheets (which thus far has actually been my greatest challenge,) checking spelling, managing meltdowns, and turning in all of that finished work at the end of each day. But, we’re not going to give up. I’m as persistent as I am a perfectionist, so I took a look at that virtual schedule and took out a red pen.

Every family’s situation is different. In our household, my husband is back in the office most days, I’m working remotely full time, and we have part-time nannies in the afternoons to help. When it comes to tweaking the virtual schedule to suit our needs, I started with a series of questions:

1. Which components are absolutely necessary? Now is not the time for extra credit people. Especially if you’re juggling multiple children’s schedules, you have my sympathy and respect, and my full permission to skip the “brain breaks” or optional P.E and let them toss a ball outside instead.
2. Are live meets recorded? If so, you can do them anytime they’re convenient for your household. We only have afternoon childcare, so we took all the morning assignments and bumped them down in our schedule. Your school day happens from 8-3? Ours is from 1-6. They’re all learning just the same. If they’re not recorded, consider moving the assignments to more convenient times while keeping them grouped by subject.
3. Are pants required? Your school may differ on this one, but in our house we require pants. However, pajamas have definitely become acceptable school attire. The only time you’ll see my son in a button-down this year is in that photo. Some battles are not worth fighting.
4. How can I manage the time? We’ve got several live meets throughout the day and with a three-year-old who is no longer attending preschool, we’ve transitioned into a sort of sprint school. My son works for an hour and then plays for a couple hours, returns to school work and so on. I’ve set reminders on our Alexa so we know when to log on for a live class, and she keeps us on schedule for snack time and clean-up as well. I just have to hope he’s applying what he’s learning to his lego-building and pokemon playing. Which brings me to the last question I asked myself.
5. What subjects can I supplement? I was half-joking when I’d tell my friends my son is now learning science through cooking in the kitchen and physics through Lego-building. Maybe it’s the isolation of the pandemic getting to me, but when I say it now I’m not really joking. My son is reading the names of all the Pokemon on his playing cards, and they’re three-syllable words. We’re using his interests to reinforce math and spelling. I’ve always been a strong believer in the educational value of play and purpose-driven learning, and I think at this point if his education at home doesn’t look the same as it does as school, he’ll still turn out just fine.