Kia ora Whānau
Today is officially the first day of the school holidays and Day 5 of our nations lockdown. I hope you’re all doing well and enjoying being close to family. For some of you this may be the first real break you’ve had in years. While it may not be the way you pictured enjoying a break, I hope you can turn this time into something good. At our house we’ve started catching up on some jobs around the place while Shafia setup a collection of family friends in my office window to be a talking point to all those going past on their walks.
Family Zone
At the end of last year I talked to you about Family Zone, a company we are partnering with as a school to provide online protection to your children and family. Last week’s lockdown necessitated us sending home our supply of school iPads to families in order to allow your children to carry on learning from home, particulalrly once the new school term starts after Easter. While we are confident about our online protection at school we know most families have quite limited protection at home. Our partnership with Family Zone allows parents to download and setup the Family Zone app on your child’s iPad which we would ask you please to do to give them protection. This comes at no charge to you. The deal we have made with Family Zone is to provide cover for all our families for up to six devices per household.
Since the end of last week Family Zone have been working with us to have this working for you. I am not sure if you can yet put cover on multiple family devices but I would ask of you please to make sure that at least the devices your children are using are setup with this, especially if they are school devices. Signup here. (Opens website in new window. Just follow the 3 step process)
Family Zone have a help team available from their website if you are having trouble making it work.
Please can we ask parents to monitor and limit the use of school owned iPads. In order to distribute them we have had to apply a high degree of trust but we have been registering some degree of misuse by apps and games being loaded on some of them. This has come from our own limited monitoring.
Routine
After close to a week at home you may have begun wondering how you might be able to do another three or more weeks of this yet. Some experts are saying keeping routines going may help. If you’ve got boredom setting in at your place the Ministry of Education have issued a possible routine to help with your children. Remembering it is the holidays you can take it or leave it, adapt it to suit, or use it sometime later:
Before 9:00am Wake up . Eat breakfast, make your bed, get dressed, put any dirty clothes in the laundry
9:00-10:00 Morning walk—Family walk with the dog, bike ride.
10:00-11:00 Learning at home . School-led learning or Sudoku, books, flash cards, study guide, journal etc
11:00-12:00 Creative time— Legos, magnatiles, drawing, crafting, play music, cook or bake etc.
12:00 pm Lunch :)
12:30 Helping at home # wipe all kitchen tables and chairs
# wipe all door handles, light switches and desk tops
# wipe both bathrooms - sinks and toilets
1:00-2:30 Quiet time Reading, puzzles, nap, Radio NZ stories
2:30-4:00 Learning at home . School-led learning or iPad games, Prodigy, Educational show
4:00-5:00 Afternoon fresh air— Bikes, walk the dog, play outside
5:00-6:00 Dinner :)
6:00-8:00 Free TV time. Kids shower time
8:00 Bedtime all kids
9:00pm Bedtime all kids who follow the daily schedule and don’t fight!
*Adapted from a resource developed by Jessica McHale Photography