A Large Gathering of Happy Things
Children need time outdoors to explore and learn. Current recommendations are for children to spend up to three hours outside a day. Now, we are not under normal circumstances and I don’t know how most of us can hit this goal following stay-at-home guidelines unless you have a yard and can watch your kids play outside for hours a day. But after hours on end inside our homes trying to come up with games or find new shows to binge, it is enormously helpful to get outside and breathe fresh air.
Last week I talked about having a theme for each week at home. It really helps me when planning out each week and day to have something to narrow my focus. Pierce’s daycare has themes for the week that they structure crafts and learning time around and I love it.
Easter is this Sunday and it will be a much different Easter than we are all used to – no matter how you celebrate it or even if you don’t celebrate Easter at all. Living through a pandemic makes every day feel strange. But I still want to find fun ways for Pierce to experience the holiday since it is one of my all-time favorites. This is driven mostly by the candy selection but can you blame me? Reese’s and Cadbury eggs alone are just the best. Here are some ideas I am adding to my weekly schedule for this week. And you can definitely still buy candy and put together baskets for your kids! Just see how much Pierce loved his last year!
I wanted to pick some books I already had that were Easter-themed. I am going to try and read these during every reading time this week. The closest I had were:
Some other great books that I found and would be great to include are:
As I started using my daily schedule I found myself jotting down ideas for each day in my notebook. By the second week, I decided another paper with every day would be helpful to use in conjunction with our daily schedule.
I found that having one of the following every day helped: a sensory bin, an indoor activity, an outdoor activity, a craft project, and a walking route. We definitely do not always get to all 5 but I found having something written down in each category helps with my anxiety about the day.
To help me come up with these I decided to pick a theme for the week along with a song or songs and a focus book. Last week I attempted to do pets and this week I am trying to focus on transportation. I am not strict about it but it helps limit my brainstorming and online surfing at night.
Life is crazy right now, to say the least. Both of us have taken the current coronavirus pandemic very seriously but even then we were not quite prepared for the level of closures that have happened. While we are extremely grateful for these closures and want everyone to stay home we now have been scrambling to figure out life teleworking with our kids at home. And we know every parent right now is struggling – whether you are an essential worker or are at home homeschooling or taking care of your newborn.
Right now between the two of us, we have three kids who are 5, 3, and 1 to keep entertained. My son Pierce is 18 months to be exact and always on the move. Plus he is used to a highly organized and creative daycare schedule that he adores. He is used to getting up, hanging out with us, eating breakfast, then leaving to see his friends and have his second breakfast. Right away I knew that with him cooped up at home we needed to figure out some type of schedule. After the last two and a half weeks we have started to figure out a routine that works fairly well and I wanted to share it in case it is helpful for any other parent or caretaker!
Toddler Schedule to help with quarantine
The first thing I did was look at recommendations for how to split up your day. Once you figure out chunks of activities it is a lot more manageable to split up your whole day. Given that playdates, playgrounds, libraries, and other fun outings were out of the picture I decided to focus on 30-45 minute blocks of time around the following: walks, outdoor time (yard, patio), reading, singing, snacks, free play, and structured play (i.e. indoor activities, art projects, and sensory bins). For me smaller chunks of time work well given Pierce’s age but for other toddlers I’d recommend thinking of splitting this up into 1-2 hour chunks for learning time (reading, puzzles, practicing counting, etc), walks/outdoor time, creative time, sensory play, and free play.
