Pandemic Homeschool Spring Break

How do you have spring break when your kids are already not going to school, and traveling is not an option? That was the dilemma we faced after four weeks of pandemic homeschooling. Naturally, I had a plan. Naturally, no one followed the plan. Here’s how our pandemic spring break really went.

The Plan

Since there isn’t a whole lot of special happening now, giving the kids a week off from the drudgery of home school felt like the right thing to do, even though everyone is worried about falling behind. Last year two of us went to Norway for spring break, and the other two skied Mt. Bachelor. There weren’t going to be any adventures like that this year. But even with home school, it’s hard to keep kids from getting really bored when they are stuck at home.

So my plan was to fill the week with non-academic projects. The recommendation to wear masks after all had just come out, so we were going to make masks for the whole family. While the sewing machine was out of the closet, maybe we’d do the next project in our sewing book.

We were going to sort through old schoolwork and decide what to save; have daily contact with friends; bake a vegan cake and a regular cake and compare them; take the girls to yoga class with me on Zoom and a bunch of other shit I’ve not forgotten. Because as I said, nothing went to plan. In the absence of access to adventure, we settled for excess – of a lot of things.

Sugar

Usually for Easter I try to make interesting baskets. I include seeds and 4” potted plants; some little toys; and a few Easter-themed candies like chocolate rabbits and Cadbury eggs. This year, my husband bought a bucketload of the kids favorite candy from the grocery store and called it good. Then on Monday my daughter baked enough chocolate chip cookies to share with her whole school. We ate them all by Wednesday.

Screentime

Instead of running projects, I binge watched all 48 episodes of the Chinese drama Arsenal Military Academy. In my defense, I did develop a history unit to supplement my teen’s world history class based on the first 10 episodes of the show. My younger daughter opted in on the unit, too.

But that was for when school started back up. According to our use reports, during spring break, by younger daughter spent 13 hours on YouTube and 6 hours on BitLife. Her older sister spent 13.5 hours on YouTube and played Animal Crossing for 6.5 hours.

Self-Reporting

Partly to make up for our extreme sloth, on the “back to school” Monday I had each girl write up what she did on spring break. Since I spent the whole week either on a deadline or watching C-drama, I was a little bit curious to find out what they had been up to. Here’s what they said.

Self-Reported Teen Spring Break

During spring break, I didn’t do much. I played a lot of Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and games on my phone. I held a Netflix party with my friends, and we watched a K-drama. I also organized a family game day where we played video games, scrabble, one word story, and heads up. I was also able to blast through 3 books and week three of the Yale happiness course. I cleaned the living room and baked chocolate chip cookies. Overall, I feel my spring break could have been more productive. But I did have a fun time and it was nice to have a break, even if it is inside of another break.

– Sophomore

Self-Reported Fifth Grade Spring Break

At first I just watched YouTube all day. But by Tuesday I had other things that I did such as watch tv, read books, I did some art and I called my friends. I had a six-foot playdate at one point and played some Switch. Me and my sister organized a family game night and I played frisbee at least once every day. Everyday seemed to go by really fast so I don’t really remember much. But yeah that’s about it I think.

-Fifth Grader

Whole Lot of Nothing

So, spring break was actually time off, in the doing nothing sense. And I supposed there is some value in this. We must have needed it, because we are all the sort of people who usually have to fill time with some kind of project. And even in the midst of all that sloth, we did do a couple of worthwhile things. One was the game day that both girls referenced – I’ll do a separate post on that one. The other was a paper crane project.

Cranes

Right before the break, a 10-year-old friend of ours started a project that I heard about on Facebook from her mom. One of her friends had just received a leukemia diagnosis. The four-year-old was going to have to spend a month in the hospital during isolation procedures, which would limit her family’s ability to be with her. Our friend wanted to make her 1000 paper cranes. We ordered a new batch of origami paper from Amazon and over the course of the week made 200 paper cranes.

I still haven’t figured out how to get them to my friend in Pierce County. Do I try to take them to the post office? Or do I drive all the way down to Roy to drop off a bag of cranes without going inside?