Shala K. Howell's Blog, page 12
March 23, 2020
Educational Resources – Science and Math
Science and math-related websites, activity guides, and resources for parents Offline activities are flagged
The All-Important Disclaimer: I have not personally vetted all of these resources. There just isn’t enough time right now to do that. So if something looks interesting to you, be sure to check it out first to make sure it will work for you and your child.
Science
How to raise a future scientist (Fancy Scientist)
(Mix of on- and offline activities)
A blog post with tips for how parents can use the world around them and their own child’s natural curiosity to foster a lifelong love of science. Specific tips provided for kids in grades K-8 and 9-12.
Read Stephanie Schuttler’s article
Highlights Kids
Website for kids packed with activities, jokes, games, and videos. Some of the activities, stories, and articles are about sciences. Some of course, are just for fun.
Visit Highlights Kids
National Geographic Kids
National Geographic’s website for kids features plenty of articles, videos, and activities about science, geography, and of course, animals. There’s even a page devoted to explaining coronavirus to your curious scientist.
Visit National Geographic Kids
Scholastic Learn at Home
A sampling of day-to-day projects for kids in grades PreK – 8 to keep them active and engaged with learning while their regular school education is suspended. Sorted by grade level.
Visit Scholastic Learn at Home
Switch Zoo
A virtual zoo for younger kids where they can watch animal videos, play animal-related games, and solve animal-themed puzzles.
Visit Switch Zoo.
Math
Fun Brain
Web site for kids grades K – 8, filled with games, videos, and other activities designed to improve math (and reading) skills. Activities are categorized by grade.
Visit Fun Brain
16 Card Games That Will Turn Your Students into Math Aces
(Instructions are online, but the games themselves are played offline)
Via reader and veteran teacher Betty K., comes this list of 16 card games parents and their kids can play to practice their math skills. All you need for these games is a deck of regular playing cards, and in some cases a pad of paper and something to write with.
Check out the card games
60+ Awesome Websites for Teaching and Learning Math
Via reader and veteran teacher Betty K., comes this list of the 60 best websites for teaching and learning math. This collection of teacher-approved sites includes comprehensive math programs, interactive tools to aid instruction, games and activities for students, and other resources for teachers.
Review the list for yourself.
Find a resource I’ve missed?
I’ll add more resources as I find them, but this list will be much better with your input too. You’re inevitably going to come across things I’d miss. If you do, please let me know about them, either by dropping a comment below or finding me on Twitter (@shalahowell).
Also, although I hope this won’t happen, I could easily add something to this list that either doesn’t exist anymore or really shouldn’t be on here. If you see something like that, please let me know.
Thank you and good luck!
March 20, 2020
"Will the FDIC really arrest me for an unpaid debt?"
We are on Day Eight of The Howells All Being Home At Once, and Day Four of Santa Clara County Residents All Huddled Up Together in Their Separate Spaces.
FDIC warns of new scam in which scammers pretend to be from the FDIC
“You know what I need right now? A threatening call from someone pretending to be the FDIC telling me to give them all of my personal financial information or else.”
No One, Ever
Yesterday I got an email from the FDIC warning about a new type of scam in which imposters try to use our collective anxiety about our personal finances to strip us of whatever financial security we have left.
These cretins are using email, text, social media, and, of course, phone calls, letters, and faxes to trick people nationwide into sending them their personal financial data, including account numbers, Social Security numbers, and remaining cash reserves.
Armed with replicas of the FDIC’s logo and occasionally the names of actual FDIC employees, these scammers may ask you to:
“Confirm” or “update” financial account informationPay them to help you investigate or recover losses from a previous scam File insurance claims, submit a bankruptcy claimant verification form, cash certified checks on their behalf, or confirm a stock holding or investment purchasesPay taxes on prize winningsSend them digital currency or gift cards to cover an unpaid debt under threat of immediate arrest or lawsuit
Don’t fall for it. Report it.
The FDIC never:
Sends unsolicited correspondence asking for money or sensitive personal informationThreatens consumersDemands payment by gift card, wire transfers, or digital currencyContacts you asking for personal details, such as bank account information, credit and debit card numbers, social security numbers, or passwords
So don’t give that information out. If in doubt about whether a communication is really from the FDIC, call the FDIC Call Center at 1-877-ASK-FDIC (1-877-275-3342), Monday – Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. (EST).
Instead, protect others by reporting the scam to your local law enforcement office or field office of the FBI. And if the scam involved the U.S. Postal Service, report it to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service too.
Protect yourself.
Sign up to receive consumer alerts like this from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)Read the FDIC release about this new crop of financial scams (FDIC)Give yourself a refresher on common imposter scams, including Social Security, romance, IRS imposter, grandkid, tech support, nanny/caregiver scams, and family emergency scams (Federal Trade Commission)Report a scam involving the U.S. Postal Service to the U.S. Postal Inspection Services (USPIS)Find your local FBI field office (FBI)
Today’s pandemic project
The completed tea and coffee station.
[image error]This is for you, Shilp. (Photo: Shala Howell)
On the off chance my landlords follow my blog, I would like to point out that no, I did not paint those pots of herbs. They are peel-and-stick wall decals made by Roommates. As far as I can tell, I can actually remove them without damaging the wood or leaving a sticky residue (yes, I tested them on a hidden spot first).
I don’t know how long I’ll actually want to keep them on the cart, but for now, those herb pots add a much-needed dose of cheerfulness to our kitchen.
Today’s tidbit of Twitter humor
You may have noticed, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter lately. I’ve also been spending a lot of time curating my Twitter feed to provide less doom and more humor. Sawyer North (@MrDarcyExplains) is one of my favorite finds.
[image error]
Editorial note
I’ve begun rolling out those education resources I promised. Yesterday, I published a brief survey of options for Scheduling and Course Planning, posted an overview of how I plan to approach the problem of corralling this information over time, and replaced the Public Art quicklink in my main menu with an Educational Resources one.
Over the coming days, I’ll add separate posts listing resources for reading, science, art, math, social studies, and believe it or not, field trips. As always, I welcome your input.
How about you? How are you holding up?
Related Links:
More Pandemic Diary entries on Caterpickles Educational Resources on Caterpickles
Educational Resources – Scheduling and Course Planning
I’ve spent a lot of time lately on the phone with various parents trying to figure out what a reasonable plan for my daughter’s education for the next month(s) might look like. I’ve also spent several days scanning the web to see what my online options are.
Basically, there are as many plans for managing this time as there are parents and educators willing to post about them on the Internet.
As far as I can tell, parents are planning to do everything from maintaining a full load of regularly scheduled course work to simply doing whatever it takes to get their family through the next few weeks without regard to any particular educational goal.
The All-Important Disclaimer: I have not personally vetted all of these resources. There just isn’t enough time right now to do that. So if something looks interesting to you, be sure to check it out first to make sure it will work for you and your child.
Schedule Planning
Schedules are as varied as families themselves are. If you test any of these, I’d love to hear how it goes. If you develop your own, I’d love to hear about that too.
A Minimalist Approach
(Offline Resource)
As Elizabeth Davis pointed out on 17 March (Twitter: @E_Davis_Romance), “Don’t worry about your kid being behind for the next grade. Everyone is going to be behind. Teachers know this. They’ll adapt. Deep breaths, everybody.”
[image error]Credit: Cat Sebastian @CatSWrites via Twitter.
A More Structured Approach
(Offline Resource)
One of the authors I follow on Twitter, Jessica Lahey (@jesslahey, author of The Gift of Failure), posted this COVID-19 Daily Schedule from Jessica McHale on her Twitter feed in March 2020. In it, Jessica McHale sets aside time for walks, academic blocks, creative blocks, chores, quiet time, and outside play time. I love that McHale offers two bedtimes — an 8 o’clock default bedtime, and a later one at 9 for “all kids who follow the daily schedule and don’t fight.”
[image error](Credit: Jessica McHale via Jessica Lahey)
In the intervening days, social media has done what social media does best — mock it with memes. However, when my daughter was in preschool, she and I both needed a set routine like this to help us get through the day. If this goes on for much longer, we may need one again.
A plan for homeschooling indefinitely
(Offline Resource)
Eric Holthaus shared a friend’s relatively straightforward and flexible approach to homeschooling indefinitely. In case you can’t read the image, the left side reads, “Something for our brains: daily work, read, inquiry.” On the right: “Something for our bodies: wash hands, eat healthy, practice karate, walks, bikes, run, yoga.”
[image error]Tweet from Hanna Alkaf (@yesitshanna) is the start of a long series of comments from parents who are sharing their schedules for this very odd time. (Credit: Hanna Alkaf, @yesitshanna via Twitter)
Hanna Alkaf’s thread, which you can find here, includes a summary of her own schedule and a wide variety of comments, resources, and tips from parents who are also in the midst of figuring out how to cope with their kids being home 24/7 over the next few weeks and/or months.
Current Caterpickles Plan
What are we actually doing?
We’re definitely keeping things minimal for a bit while we adjust to all of the other changes and wait to see if anyone in the house was exposed to the novel coronavirus before the shelter-in-place order came through Monday.
Our plan (as of March 17): We’re lucky in that my daughter’s seventh grade teachers continue to post new assignments online, and we are set up to access both the assignments and the necessary reading to complete them (the school sent a complete collection of her books home with her at the beginning of the year).
So… My daughter completes the assignments her teachers post on Schoology in the morning, takes a break for lunch and recess, finishes her homework if necessary in the afternoon, does something to help out the family, and then has free time to be outside, read, play games, or check in with friends until dinner.
My contribution to this? Track her assignments, make sure she is completing them more or less on time, provide tech/resource support, answer questions, if I can, and provide a steady supply of brownies.
Course Development
Parents have been home-schooling for years now, and there is a wealth of knowledge out there. Here are a few resources that I’ve found so far. Homeschooling parents, I’d love it if you’d leave a comment telling us about your favorite curriculum and/or tips.
Advice from a teacher on what to consider when setting up an at-home education plan for your kids
Slate’s Care and Feeding column from 19 March 2020 was devoted to the question of whether (and how) parents forced to home-school for the first time should approach the problem. “Am I supposed to home-school my kid right now?“
In it, Carrie Bauer, a middle and high school teacher from New York State, does her best to answer parents’ most pressing questions, including what school closures mean for our children’s education, what we should be doing to help their kids, whether Disney+ counts as an educational resource, what to do about our child’s IEP, and how to cope with all of this uncertainty.
Montessori at Home (Kids Ages 0-6)
(Offline Resource/Book)
If you decide to buy one or more of the Montessori At Home books, I encourage you to contact your local independent bookstore and ask them to order it for you. Let’s face it. Amazon is probably going to be ok. Your local bookseller may not. The link in this entry will take you to Indiebound, a website designed to make it easy to order from your local bookstore online.
Sim Kern (@sim_kern) posted an excellent Twitter thread recently on how parents could use Montessori principles to integrate education into everyday activities.
Their thread includes suggestions for subjects including math, music, social studies, English, art, and PE. Their ideas are approachable and readily adaptable. Baking brownies? Have your child calculate the ingredients for a double recipe or a half, or maybe 2/3rds. Taking a walk? Use it as an opportunity to talk about the ecosystem or water cycle. Or an opportunity to collect bugs. You know, whatever your child’s into.
[image error]Sim Kern’s thread on how to adapt Montessori principles to construct a more relaxed, yet deeply engaging and relationship-nurturing education for your kids at home. (Credit: @Sim_Kern via Twitter)
Montessori at Home books on IndieBound.
A Parent’s Guide to Google Classroom
Thanks for the tip, Betty!
The link in the above header opens a Google doc containing a list of virtual field trip, reading & writing, math, STEAM, and other educational resources available through Google Classroom. If any of these appeal to you, this presentation contains instructions for signing up for Google Classroom.
Progressively Classical’s Tips for Weekly Course Planning
For those of you who are considering grabbing your child’s textbooks, figuring out how many chapters on average they would work through in whatever period of time their school is closed, and working those chapters with them, you might find this post from Progressively Classical on how to create a week’s worth of online classes helpful
Progressively Classical’s Sample Fifth Grade Class Schedule
Progressively Classical, an online K-12 teacher, posted a schedule of fifth grade classes based on the Well-Trained Mind homeschooling curriculum on their Twitter feed this week (@StuckIn48403550).
Find a resource I’ve missed?
I’ll add more resources as I find them, but this list will be much better with your input too. You’re inevitably going to come across things I’d miss. If you do, please let me know about them, either by dropping a comment below or finding me on Twitter (@shalahowell).
Also, although I hope this won’t happen, I could easily add something to this list that either doesn’t exist anymore or really shouldn’t be on here. If you see something like that, please let me know.
Thank you and good luck!
Scheduling and Course Planning
I’ve spent a lot of time lately on the phone with various parents trying to figure out what a reasonable plan for my daughter’s education for the next month(s) might look like. I’ve also spent several days scanning the web to see what my online options are.
Basically, there are as many plans for managing this time as there are parents and educators willing to post about them on the Internet.
As far as I can tell, parents are planning to do everything from maintaining a full load of regularly scheduled course work to simply doing whatever it takes to get their family through the next few weeks without regard to any particular educational goal.
The All-Important Disclaimer: I have not personally vetted all of these resources. There just isn’t enough time right now to do that. So if something looks interesting to you, be sure to check it out first to make sure it will work for you and your child.
Schedule Planning
Schedules are as varied as families themselves are. If you test any of these, I’d love to hear how it goes. If you develop your own, I’d love to hear about that too.
A Minimalist Approach
Offline Resource
As Elizabeth Davis pointed out on 17 March (Twitter: @E_Davis_Romance), “Don’t worry about your kid being behind for the next grade. Everyone is going to be behind. Teachers know this. They’ll adapt. Deep breaths, everybody.”
[image error]Credit: Cat Sebastian @CatSWrites via Twitter.
A More Structured Approach
Offline Resource
One of the authors I follow on Twitter, Jessica Lahey (@jesslahey, author of The Gift of Failure), posted this COVID-19 Daily Schedule from Jessica McHale on her Twitter feed in March 2020. In it, Jessica McHale sets aside time for walks, academic blocks, creative blocks, chores, quiet time, and outside play time. I love that McHale offers two bedtimes — an 8 o’clock default bedtime, and a later one at 9 for “all kids who follow the daily schedule and don’t fight.”
[image error](Credit: Jessica McHale via Jessica Lahey)
In the intervening days, social media has done what social media does best — mock it with memes. However, when my daughter was in preschool, she and I both needed a set routine like this to help us get through the day. If this goes on for much longer, we may need one again.
A plan for homeschooling indefinitely
Offline Resource
Eric Holthaus shared a friend’s relatively straightforward and flexible approach to homeschooling indefinitely. In case you can’t read the image, the left side reads, “Something for our brains: daily work, read, inquiry.” On the right: “Something for our bodies: wash hands, eat healthy, practice karate, walks, bikes, run, yoga.”
[image error]Tweet from Hanna Alkaf (@yesitshanna) is the start of a long series of comments from parents who are sharing their schedules for this very odd time. (Credit: Hanna Alkaf, @yesitshanna via Twitter)
Hanna Alkaf’s thread, which you can find here, includes a summary of her own schedule and a wide variety of comments, resources, and tips from parents who are also in the midst of figuring out how to cope with their kids being home 24/7 over the next few weeks and/or months.
Current Caterpickles Plan
What are we actually doing?
We’re definitely keeping things minimal for a bit while we adjust to all of the other changes and wait to see if anyone in the house was exposed to the novel coronavirus before the shelter-in-place order came through Monday.
Our plan (as of March 17): We’re lucky in that my daughter’s seventh grade teachers continue to post new assignments online, and we are set up to access both the assignments and the necessary reading to complete them (the school sent a complete collection of her books home with her at the beginning of the year).
So… My daughter completes the assignments her teachers post on Schoology in the morning, takes a break for lunch and recess, finishes her homework if necessary in the afternoon, does something to help out the family, and then has free time to be outside, read, play games, or check in with friends until dinner.
My contribution to this? Track her assignments, make sure she is completing them more or less on time, provide tech/resource support, answer questions, if I can, and provide a steady supply of brownies.
Course Development
Parents have been home-schooling for years now, and there is a wealth of knowledge out there. Here are a few resources that I’ve found so far. Homeschooling parents, I’d love it if you’d leave a comment telling us about your favorite curriculum and/or tips.
Advice from a teacher on what to consider when setting up an at-home education plan for your kids
Slate’s Care and Feeding column from 19 March 2020 was devoted to the question of whether (and how) parents forced to home-school for the first time should approach the problem. “Am I supposed to home-school my kid right now?“
In it, Carrie Bauer, a middle and high school teacher from New York State, does her best to answer parents’ most pressing questions, including what school closures mean for our children’s education, what we should be doing to help their kids, whether Disney+ counts as an educational resource, what to do about our child’s IEP, and how to cope with all of this uncertainty.
Montessori at Home (Kids Ages 0-6)
Offline Resource/Book.
If you decide to buy one or more of the Montessori At Home books, I encourage you to contact your local independent bookstore and ask them to order it for you. Let’s face it. Amazon is probably going to be ok. Your local bookseller may not. The link in this entry will take you to Indiebound, a website designed to make it easy to order from your local bookstore online.
Sim Kern (@sim_kern) posted an excellent Twitter thread recently on how parents could use Montessori principles to integrate education into everyday activities.
Their thread includes suggestions for subjects including math, music, social studies, English, art, and PE. Their ideas are approachable and readily adaptable. Baking brownies? Have your child calculate the ingredients for a double recipe or a half, or maybe 2/3rds. Taking a walk? Use it as an opportunity to talk about the ecosystem or water cycle. Or an opportunity to collect bugs. You know, whatever your child’s into.
[image error]Sim Kern’s thread on how to adapt Montessori principles to construct a more relaxed, yet deeply engaging and relationship-nurturing education for your kids at home. (Credit: @Sim_Kern via Twitter)
Montessori at Home books on IndieBound.
A Parent’s Guide to Google Classroom
Thanks for the tip, Betty!
The link in the above header opens a Google doc containing a list of virtual field trip, reading & writing, math, STEAM, and other educational resources available through Google Classroom. If any of these appeal to you, this presentation contains instructions for signing up for Google Classroom.
Progressively Classical’s Tips for Weekly Course Planning
For those of you who are considering grabbing your child’s textbooks, figuring out how many chapters on average they would work through in whatever period of time their school is closed, and working those chapters with them, you might find this post from Progressively Classical on how to create a week’s worth of online classes helpful
Progressively Classical’s Sample Fifth Grade Class Schedule
Progressively Classical, an online K-12 teacher, posted a schedule of fifth grade classes based on the Well-Trained Mind homeschooling curriculum on their Twitter feed this week (@StuckIn48403550).
Find a resource I’ve missed?
I’ll add more resources as I find them, but this list will be much better with your input too. You’re inevitably going to come across things I’d miss. If you do, please let me know about them, either by dropping a comment below or finding me on Twitter (@shalahowell).
Also, although I hope this won’t happen, I could easily add something to this list that either doesn’t exist anymore or really shouldn’t be on here. If you see something like that, please let me know.
Thank you and good luck!
Educational Resources for Parents – Category Overview
You may not be in a place to use these right now. That’s ok. We are all doing the best we can to keep going through this once-in-a-century moment in world history.
In fact, as you establish your children’s home-based academic schedule, it’s worth thinking about whether trying to continue their education at the normal pace is a feasible goal in the middle of a pandemic, no matter what their age. Alan Richardson, a Professor in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, has been very open on Twitter about his own doubts about the general assumption that education can continue as usual, just online, this spring.
In a series of tweets posted on 18 March 2020, Alan Richardson (@arichardson_phi) says:
It is indicative of the current state of the educational mission of universities that professors are being offered a lot of technical support in moving things online, but almost no help in how to think about the morality or humanity of continuing to make substantial intellectual demands on students in the current public health, economic, and existential crisis. Where is the leadership on, or even the discussion of, how we can model the compassion of proper academic culture?
Alan Richardson (@arichardson_phi) via Twitter, March 18, 2020.
If college students aren’t in a position to maintain their regular course load right now, how can we expect all of our younger learners (and their already over-taxed parents) to be able to do it?
There are definitely kids out there who will thrive on / need a regular course of instruction during this period. Maybe yours is one of them.
There are also kids out there whose anxiety is already off the charts. For those kids, keeping a regular learning schedule during a pandemic might not be the best plan.
You are the world’s foremost expert in your children and your family. You know best what your family needs right now, when it comes to your children’s education these next few months. Allow yourself to do that without regret.
My intention in creating these lists is not to shame you into doing more than is right for your family, but to ensure that Caterpickles readers have a variety of resources readily available to them as they work to identify their family’s best path forward.
How this section of the blog is organized
I just started tracking these types of resources a few days ago, and already I can tell there’s an overwhelming number of helpful people out there. So rather than make one enormous list on a single page, I decided to treat this as a blog-within-a-blog, put each type of resource on its own page, categorize all those pages as Educational Resources, and add the Educational Resources category to the quick links at the top of this blog.
Ideally, this means that you will be able to open this section of the Caterpickles website, see a list of major categories, and jump directly to the sort of resources you are looking for. That’s the goal.
Still, this isn’t a perfect method.
First, anyone who follows this blog by email is going to get a lot of emails from me over the next few days as I roll these posts out. I’m sorry about that.
It also means that when I add to these lists, I’ll simply be updating existing posts, so no one will be automatically notified when new items appear. That’s an easy problem to solve though. I’ll just use my main blog to let you know when I’ve made significant updates.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I have not personally vetted all of these resources. There just isn’t enough time right now to do that. So if something looks interesting to you, be sure to vet it before you use it with your child.
Find a resource I’ve missed?
You’re inevitably going to come across things I’ve missed. If you do, please let me know about them, either by dropping a comment below or finding me on Twitter (@shalahowell).
I also want to take a moment to thank everyone who has reached out to me through email, Twitter, or Facebook to send me their suggestions for this section. If you sent me one, but don’t see it on the list, assume it’s my mistake and maybe, if you’re willing, send me a little reminder?
If we all work together, things may still turn out all right.
March 19, 2020
“Can we take our cat to the vet while we're under a shelter-in-place order?”
We are on Day Seven of The Howells All Being Home At Once, and Day Three of Santa Clara County Residents All Huddled Up Together in Their Separate Spaces.
Caring for our pets in a pandemic
Thankfully, as far as we can tell, Canelo is currently well. We have plenty of kibble, kitty litter, and three months of his prescription flea medicine on hand (California fleas turn out to be resistant to the over-the-counter flea meds). From that perspective things should be ok.
But he’s a cat who loves to leap to high places, is easily startled while there, and has a tendency to try to eat wildly inappropriate things. He’s also about the age my previous cat Mulberry was when she developed hyperthyroidism. In short, stuff could happen.
What do we do if Canelo needs to go to the vet while our county is under a shelter-in-place order?
Veterinary services are still considered essential services in our county’s current iteration of shelter-in-place. But as you might expect, how we access them looks a little different now.
Yesterday morning I received a note from Canelo’s vet asking that when we arrive for our appointment, we call their office from the car to let them know we have arrived. They will send a tech out to our car to carry Canelo (in his carrier) inside the office for us. Since their parking lot is small, we have been asked to run other errands while the examination takes place. When it’s done, they will call us to arrange a time for us to pick Canelo up.
Pickup follows a similar procedure. We call the office, they bring medicines, prescription food, and most importantly, the cat himself out to our car for us.
I’m letting you know, in case your local vets adopt a similar arrangement, if they haven’t already.
[image error]“Look, CatMom, let’s make a deal. I’ll shelter in this box and you don’t take me to the vet.” (Photo: Shala Howell)
If you’d like to read more about how to take care of your pets during this deeply strange and unsettling time, this New York Post article, “How to care for dogs and cats during coronavirus,” is a reasonable place to start. Being the New York Post, naturally it opens with a photograph of a dog wearing what can only be a completely ineffective and wildly unsanitary face mask.
Senior hours at the local grocery store
Several stores have established special shopping hours for seniors, pregnant women, and other at-risk people at their stores. In the Bay Area, Whole Foods, Safeway, Target, Albertson’s, Rainbow Grocery, Piedmont Grocery, and Zanotto’s Family Market have all established special Senior Only shopping hours on various days of the week. The hours tend to occur during the first hour of the shopping day, when the store is naturally in its cleanest and most fully-stocked state. Hours and days vary from store to store.
If you fall in a higher risk category but don’t live in the Bay Area, I encourage you to call your preferred grocery store and pharmacy and ask them if they are planning to or have already established similarly protected shopping hours for their at-risk customers.
Read more about the specific hours set aside for higher-risk Bay Area shoppers: “Whole Foods, Safeway among Bay Area grocery stores offering seniors-only hours” (SF Gate, 18 March 2020)
A note of encouragement
Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, is sometimes profane, but she’s also reliably funny, and on St. Patrick’s Day, quite encouraging. Her St. Patrick’s Day post, “It’s going to be okay, y’all. Let’s play” opened with this reminder:
“Right now many of us are settling into a long and somewhat unsettling bout of social distancing or quarantines and the world is scary. So first off, here is a reminder that whatever you feel is okay to feel. If you’re scared or sad or relieved or silly or laughing or crying or a combination of all of them in rapid succession that is perfectly human and I salute you.”
– Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess, 17 March 2020
She then paints a ridiculous picture of the moment when she and the only other person in the dog park shouted dibs across the lawn to each other, staking claims to their respective 20 square feet of grass. “I’M NOT SICK BUT DON’T COME OVER HERE!”
Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that our timeline still offers its share of weird but funny moments.
Read the rest of Jenny Lawson’s post.
Today’s pandemic project
The Thirteen-Year-Old has decided that she wants to redo her room, so for the rest of this week, she will be using the afternoons to sort through her things, setting aside stuff she no longer needs to donate for storage in the garage (are donations considered essential errands?), and restocking her room with just the things she uses every day or takes comfort in.
There will be no photos associated with this project.
Today’s tidbit of Twitter humor
Emily @OtherPens posted a thread this week of how various Jane Austen characters would cope with the pandemic and/or being in quarantine. Many of the entries are hilariously spot on. Take, for example, this one about Mrs. Bennet from Pride & Prejudice:
[image error]Emily’s tweet, in case you can’t read it, says “Mrs. Bennet – tries to get all her daughters tested for COVID-19 so they can meet doctors.” (Credit: Emily @OtherPens via Twitter)
Pride & Prejudice fans will no doubt remember that Mrs. Bennet’s goal in life is to see each of her five daughters safely married before her husband dies and the money runs out. (Longbourn, the estate where the Bennets live, is entailed to nearest male relation, which since the Bennets have no sons, means a clergyman named Mr. Collins.) Her glee when her eldest daughter Jane falls ill while visiting the sister of the most eligible gentleman in town and is forced to remain for several days in his stately manor is still palpable 200 years later. Mrs. Bennet loves it when a plan comes together.
Editorial note
Over the next few days, I will begin rolling out those education resources I promised earlier this week.
I just started tracking these types of resources on March 14, and already I can tell there’s an overwhelming number of helpful people out there. So rather than make one enormous list on a single page, I decided to treat this as a blog-within-a-blog, write a new post to track each type of resource, categorize all those posts under Educational Resources, and make the Educational Resources category to the quick links at the top of this blog.
Ideally, this means that you will be able to open the Educational Resources section of the Caterpickles website, see a list of the resource types, and jump directly to the page listing the types of things you’re looking for.
Still, this isn’t a perfect method. Anyone who follows this blog by email is going to get a lot of emails from me over the next few days as I roll these posts out. I apologize for that. Thank you for your patience.
How about you? How are you holding up?
Related Links:
More Pandemic Diary entries on Caterpickles How to care for dogs and cats during coronavirus (New York Post, 17 March 2020)“Whole Foods, Safeway among Bay Area grocery stores offering seniors-only hours” (SF Gate, 18 March 2020)
Pandemic Diary 19 March 2020: How do we take our cat to the vet while we're under a shelter-in-place order?
We are on Day Seven of The Howells All Being Home At Once, and Day Three of Santa Clara County Residents All Huddled Up Together in Their Separate Spaces.
Caring for our pets in a pandemic
Thankfully, as far as we can tell, Canelo is currently well. We have plenty of kibble, kitty litter, and three months of his prescription flea medicine on hand (California fleas turn out to be resistant to the over-the-counter flea meds). From that perspective things should be ok.
But he’s a cat who loves to leap to high places, is easily startled while there, and has a tendency to try to eat wildly inappropriate things. He’s also about the age my previous cat Mulberry was when she developed hyperthyroidism. In short, stuff could happen.
What do we do if Canelo needs to go to the vet while our county is under a shelter-in-place order?
Veterinary services are still considered essential services in our county’s current iteration of shelter-in-place. But as you might expect, how we access them looks a little different now.
Yesterday morning I received a note from Canelo’s vet asking that when we arrive for our appointment, we call their office from the car to let them know we have arrived. They will send a tech out to our car to carry Canelo (in his carrier) inside the office for us. Since their parking lot is small, we have been asked to run other errands while the examination takes place. When it’s done, they will call us to arrange a time for us to pick Canelo up.
Pickup follows a similar procedure. We call the office, they bring medicines, prescription food, and most importantly, the cat himself out to our car for us.
I’m letting you know, in case your local vets adopt a similar arrangement, if they haven’t already.
[image error]“Look, CatMom, let’s make a deal. I’ll shelter in this box and you don’t take me to the vet.” (Photo: Shala Howell)
If you’d like to read more about how to take care of your pets during this deeply strange and unsettling time, this New York Post article, “How to care for dogs and cats during coronavirus,” is a reasonable place to start. Being the New York Post, naturally it opens with a photograph of a dog wearing what can only be a completely ineffective and wildly unsanitary face mask.
Senior hours at the local grocery store
Several stores have established special shopping hours for seniors, pregnant women, and other at-risk people at their stores. In the Bay Area, Whole Foods, Safeway, Target, Albertson’s, Rainbow Grocery, Piedmont Grocery, and Zanotto’s Family Market have all established special Senior Only shopping hours on various days of the week. The hours tend to occur during the first hour of the shopping day, when the store is naturally in its cleanest and most fully-stocked state. Hours and days vary from store to store.
If you fall in a higher risk category but don’t live in the Bay Area, I encourage you to call your preferred grocery store and pharmacy and ask them if they are planning to or have already established similarly protected shopping hours for their at-risk customers.
Read more about the specific hours set aside for higher-risk Bay Area shoppers: “Whole Foods, Safeway among Bay Area grocery stores offering seniors-only hours” (SF Gate, 18 March 2020)
A note of encouragement
Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, is sometimes profane, but she’s also reliably funny, and on St. Patrick’s Day, quite encouraging. Her St. Patrick’s Day post, “It’s going to be okay, y’all. Let’s play” opened with this reminder:
“Right now many of us are settling into a long and somewhat unsettling bout of social distancing or quarantines and the world is scary. So first off, here is a reminder that whatever you feel is okay to feel. If you’re scared or sad or relieved or silly or laughing or crying or a combination of all of them in rapid succession that is perfectly human and I salute you.”
– Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess, 17 March 2020
She then paints a ridiculous picture of the moment when she and the only other person in the dog park shouted dibs across the lawn to each other, staking claims to their respective 20 square feet of grass. “I’M NOT SICK BUT DON’T COME OVER HERE!”
Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that our timeline still offers its share of weird but funny moments.
Read the rest of Jenny Lawson’s post.
Today’s pandemic project
The Thirteen-Year-Old has decided that she wants to redo her room, so for the rest of this week, she will be using the afternoons to sort through her things, setting aside stuff she no longer needs to donate for storage in the garage (are donations considered essential errands?), and restocking her room with just the things she uses every day or takes comfort in.
There will be no photos associated with this project.
Today’s tidbit of Twitter humor
Emily @OtherPens posted a thread this week of how various Jane Austen characters would cope with the pandemic and/or being in quarantine. Many of the entries are hilariously spot on. Take, for example, this one about Mrs. Bennet from Pride & Prejudice:
[image error]Emily’s tweet, in case you can’t read it, says “Mrs. Bennet – tries to get all her daughters tested for COVID-19 so they can meet doctors.” (Credit: Emily @OtherPens via Twitter)
Pride & Prejudice fans will no doubt remember that Mrs. Bennet’s goal in life is to see each of her five daughters safely married before her husband dies and the money runs out. (Longbourn, the estate where the Bennets live, is entailed to nearest male relation, which since the Bennets have no sons, means a clergyman named Mr. Collins.) Her glee when her eldest daughter Jane falls ill while visiting the sister of the most eligible gentleman in town and is forced to remain for several days in his stately manor is still palpable 200 years later. Mrs. Bennet loves it when a plan comes together.
Editorial note
Over the next few days, I will begin rolling out those education resources I promised earlier this week.
I just started tracking these types of resources on March 14, and already I can tell there’s an overwhelming number of helpful people out there. So rather than make one enormous list on a single page, I decided to treat this as a blog-within-a-blog, write a new post to track each type of resource, categorize all those posts under Educational Resources, and make the Educational Resources category to the quick links at the top of this blog.
Ideally, this means that you will be able to open the Educational Resources section of the Caterpickles website, see a list of the resource types, and jump directly to the page listing the types of things you’re looking for.
Still, this isn’t a perfect method. Anyone who follows this blog by email is going to get a lot of emails from me over the next few days as I roll these posts out. I apologize for that. Thank you for your patience.
How about you? How are you holding up?
Related Links:
More Pandemic Diary entries on Caterpickles How to care for dogs and cats during coronavirus (New York Post, 17 March 2020)“Whole Foods, Safeway among Bay Area grocery stores offering seniors-only hours” (SF Gate, 18 March 2020)
March 18, 2020
Waiting in place
We are on Day Six of The Howells All Being Home At Once, and Day Two of Santa Clara County Residents All Huddled Up Together in Their Separate Spaces.
Education Update
Remember that COVID-19 Daily Schedule from my first Pandemic Diary post? Funny thing happened when I tried to implement that…
[image error]Chart on the left by Jessica McHale via Jessica Lahey on Twitter. Chart on the right: Shit Academics Say via Facebook. In case you can’t read the chart on the right, all the scheduled stuff has been crossed out. The words read “try to keep kids alive while also working from home and pray they don’t start fighting while I’m on a conference call.”
(I apologize for using what The Thirteen-Year-Old refers to as the s- word here, but that’s their name and I need to give them credit for their joke, so I feel like my hands are a little tied.)
I wish I could truthfully say I’d thought of this joke first. Instead, Shit Academics Say posted it on Facebook and someone dumped it into one of my parenting feeds. It clearly struck a chord.
Things aren’t really that bad here, yet, but we’re definitely keeping things minimal for a bit while we adjust to all of the other changes and wait to see if anyone in the house was exposed to the novel coronavirus before the shelter-in-place order came through Monday.
Our basic plan (as of March 17): My daughter completes the assignments her teachers post on Schoology in the morning, takes a break for lunch and recess, does something to help out the family, and then has free time until dinner.
Tuesday’s Pandemic Project
Daddyo has listened to my complaints about being kicked out of my office, and has set up shop at the kitchen table instead. This is much better. Except that now we don’t have a place to eat.
Fortunately, my Aunt Jeanne gave me a beautiful maple leaf table a few years ago. In this house, we’ve been using it as our coffee station. But it makes a great kitchen table.
But what about the coffee, Shala?
I had been intending to buy some piece of furniture to act as a proper coffee station, but I never got around to it. Now that the shelter in place order is in effect, I am having trouble convincing myself that buying a coffee cart qualifies as an essential errand.
Luckily, the owners of the house we are renting left behind a wooden cart meant to hold a microwave. We moved it out to the garage because we didn’t need it at the time, it was pretty dirty, and its knobs were falling off. My project on Tuesday was to clean it up, give it a couple of shiny new cabinet knobs, and move all the coffee stuff from Aunt Jeanne’s table to it.
Here it is, post-cleaning and knob installation, but before taking up service as our new coffee station.
[image error]The cleaned up temporary coffee cart. Fun perk — See those wheels? Theoretically, I could use it to wheel pots of tea and coffee as needed to anyone in the house. Yeah, I know. I’m never really going to do that. But I could. It’s the potential that matters here. (Photo: Shala Howell)
How about you? How are you holding up?
Related Links:
Five Things Everyone Should Know about the Coronavirus Outbreak (Yale Medicine)
Pandemic Diary 18 March 2020: Waiting in place
We are on Day Six of The Howells All Being Home At Once, and Day Two of Santa Clara County Residents All Huddled Up Together in Their Separate Spaces.
Education Update
Remember that COVID-19 Daily Schedule from my first Pandemic Diary post? Funny thing happened when I tried to implement that…
[image error]Chart on the left by Jessica McHale via Jessica Lahey on Twitter. Chart on the right: Shit Academics Say via Facebook. In case you can’t read the chart on the right, all the scheduled stuff has been crossed out. The words read “try to keep kids alive while also working from home and pray they don’t start fighting while I’m on a conference call.”
(I apologize for using what The Thirteen-Year-Old refers to as the s- word here, but that’s their name and I need to give them credit for their joke, so I feel like my hands are a little tied.)
I wish I could truthfully say I’d thought of this joke first. Instead, Shit Academics Say posted it on Facebook and someone dumped it into one of my parenting feeds. It clearly struck a chord.
Things aren’t really that bad here, yet, but we’re definitely keeping things minimal for a bit while we adjust to all of the other changes and wait to see if anyone in the house was exposed to the novel coronavirus before the shelter-in-place order came through Monday.
Our basic plan (as of March 17): My daughter completes the assignments her teachers post on Schoology in the morning, takes a break for lunch and recess, does something to help out the family, and then has free time until dinner.
Tuesday’s Pandemic Project
Daddyo has listened to my complaints about being kicked out of my office, and has set up shop at the kitchen table instead. This is much better. Except that now we don’t have a place to eat.
Fortunately, my Aunt Jeanne gave me a beautiful maple leaf table a few years ago. In this house, we’ve been using it as our coffee station. But it makes a great kitchen table.
But what about the coffee, Shala?
I had been intending to buy some piece of furniture to act as a proper coffee station, but I never got around to it. Now that the shelter in place order is in effect, I am having trouble convincing myself that buying a coffee cart qualifies as an essential errand.
Luckily, the owners of the house we are renting left behind a wooden cart meant to hold a microwave. We moved it out to the garage because we didn’t need it at the time, it was pretty dirty, and its knobs were falling off. My project on Tuesday was to clean it up, give it a couple of shiny new cabinet knobs, and move all the coffee stuff from Aunt Jeanne’s table to it.
Here it is, post-cleaning and knob installation, but before taking up service as our new coffee station.
[image error]The cleaned up temporary coffee cart. Fun perk — See those wheels? Theoretically, I could use it to wheel pots of tea and coffee as needed to anyone in the house. Yeah, I know. I’m never really going to do that. But I could. It’s the potential that matters here. (Photo: Shala Howell)
How about you? How are you holding up?
Related Links:
Five Things Everyone Should Know about the Coronavirus Outbreak (Yale Medicine)
March 17, 2020
“This is not helpful information right now, Mommyo”
We are on Day Five of The Howells All Being Home At Once, and things are going about as well as can be expected, to borrow one of my husband’s more useful phrases.
Education Update
My daughter’s teachers continue to post new assignments online. At the beginning of the year, my daughter’s school issued a set of textbooks to every student to keep at home. Assuming new assignments keep appearing (and we continue to be able to access them), we *might* be able to keep our pandemic education plan as simple as make sure that my daughter does the reading and completes her homework every day.
I recognize how fortunate I am to be able to say that. Still, I’d be amazed if it actually worked out that way. Teachers add a lot to the learning process, very little of which I know how to do.
So I’ve decided to create a new permanent page on this blog to track some of the educational resources I discover during this process, just in case you or I end up needing them.
I hope to release the first iteration of that list tomorrow, and will add new options as I find them. I would love it if you would let me know about any useful resources you find that aren’t yet on the list. Many will inevitably be online options, but I would also welcome print/offline curriculum suggestions, since not everyone has access to broadband.
That said, there’s a reason I had planned to send my daughter to school rather than attempting to take on her entire education on my own.
Yesterday’s lessons in homeschooling by the under-equipped
Yesterday I made my first attempt at home-schooling a seventh grader. Reviews were not great, but I learned a few things and hopefully today will be better.
Lesson #1: Working from home is hard for kids too.
I have worked at home for years, but my daughter is not very good at it yet. For the next few days at least, a huge part of my job will be to help my daughter develop the skills and focus to stay on task even when that task involves using a computer equipped with much more interesting things.
[image error]The Thirteen-Year-Old’s friends decorated her locker for her birthday. After they announced school was closing for a month, we made a special trip to pick them up. They’re hanging on her door at home now. We are looking forward to getting back to a world in which this sort of everyday social interaction happens. (Photo: Shala Howell)
Lesson #2: Before we do anything else, my daughter and I are going to have to figure out how to work together.
The first thing I do every day is identify the 3-6 most important things to do that day. Once I have my list, I get started, completing jobs in whatever order makes the most sense. I’ve done this for years, so when it came time to begin my daughter’s first at-home school day, I naturally assumed her school day would begin the same way.
I logged onto the website my daughter’s school uses to communicate those assignments (Schoology), and began reading all of them out loud to her. For the first assignment, this appeared to work great. It was, in fact, new-to-her work. Encouraged, I kept scrolling through Schoology, calling out new assignments as I found them.
As the list grew longer, my daughter’s responses became increasingly nonverbal. Concerned that this meant she couldn’t hear me, I increased the volume of my voice (I know). After about 10 minutes of this, she interrupted me and said: “Mommyo, that information isn’t very helpful right now. I’m still working on that first thing you told me about.”
Oops. I had forgotten that my daughter is used to working on one subject at a time. When it’s time for English, she goes to English class, does the reading, and if time permits in class, works the assignment. When the bell rings for Science, she goes to Science class, does the reading, works the assignment, and so on.
This concept of browsing all of her classes first thing in the morning to identify the entire day’s worth of work at once was completely foreign to her. All I did was create one stressed out middle schooler.
Today’s homeschooling adjustment based on student feedback
From now on, The Thirteen-Year-Old will log onto Schoology first, make a list of all of her assignments, show it to me for double-checking, and then spend the morning working on them, asking me for help as needed. At 11:30 or so, she’ll take a break eat lunch, go outside, check in with her friends, etc, while I verify what if anything, remains to be done. At 1 o’clock, the school day will resume and she’ll complete whatever’s left.
Also, I will try not to dwell on the fact that I lasted a whole 10 minutes as a teacher before my daughter shut it down yesterday.
Crafting Update (aka My Pandemic Project)
Shakespeare may have written King Lear during his plague, but it looks like I’ll have to be content just to catch up on some overdue blankets. The blanket I’ve been promising my sister for the past two years is finally well underway. I’ve completed about 30 inches of it so far, 10 of them since Friday (aka Day One of The Howells All Being Home At Once).
[image error]Meg’s blanket is very grey. (Photo: Shala Howell)
Today’s Dose of Twitter Humor
[image error](Source: @BloodyMargot via Twitter)
How about you? How are you holding up?
Related Links:
Social Distancing: This is not a snow day (Ariadne Labs, a joint venture of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)The best thing everyday Americans can do to fight coronavirus? #StayHome, save lives (USA Today op-ed by sixteen national healthcare leaders)
