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Homeschooling Tips for the Quarantined.

March 19, 2020March 19, 2020 Rachel Callahan Uncategorized

I’ve had some readers ask me to write a tips post on homeschooling for those of you who very suddenly found yourselves involuntarily in such a situation, thanks to COVID-19, who is apparently homeschooling’s hardest lobbyist. There are a ton of resources already floating around about that, though, so I’m not going to retread a lot of ground. However, I do have 10ish years worth of homeschooling posts peppered into my blog, but seeing as how I have 2,355 blog posts, I get how it might be hard to find the ones that are helpful RIGHT NOW. So first I’m going to start off with a couple quick notes, then I’m just going to give you a link index of some posts that you might find helpful.

Tips for RIGHT NOW:

Don’t panic about cramming in a bunch of education right now. It’s a weird time. We’re all distracted. Focus is nearly impossible. You can’t possibly be expected to accomplish a perfect school day. Relax. Enjoy the forced break. Do fun stuff. Be creative. Don’t worry about getting in every subject.
Use the resources being provided by wonderful people for this crisis. Our favorite is Mo Willem’s daily lunch doodles.

His voice is so lovely and soothing and his doodles are so fun. We have been looking forward to doodling with Mo every day. James Spann also did a live Science/Weather show today, and it is available to rewatch – it was excellent and I highly recommend it for when you need an hour for the kids to watch something educational while you get stuff done – and it totally counts for science for one day – maybe two.
Feel free to list the resources you’ve found in the comments!
iPad education is awesome. Khan Academy is fantastic for Math and Grammar, and totally free. There are many games for math, spelling, reading, grammar, and more. Kids learn exceptionally well via fun, so why not have some fun.

Links to old posts that might inspire you:
(Disclaimer: These posts are only if you NEED things to do. Do not feel pressure to do ANY of these things. I just told you to relax, remember??)

For the Mamas Thinking about Homeschooling – I wrote this post a few years ago because every Spring, I get a fresh batch of moms wanting to ask me all about homeschooling. Obviously this post applies to a more permanent homeschool situation, but you might find it helpful or encouraging anyway.
USE MOTIVATION SYSTEMS. My kids are old enough that I don’t need these anymore, but they are so so so so so (did I mention SO?) helpful for when your kids are little, or are learning to be self-motivated. Here’s a year that I made and laminated Lego Bucks, here’s a year that I just printed a sheet with numbers and put stickers on it, and here’s a system that worked so well I used it several years – tickets, because kids love tickets.

Easy Craft Projects are a great time-filler and are very motivating. Here’s one we did with fabric scraps for geography, and here’s several crafts we did with paint chips (they could be done with colored paper as well.)

If you want to keep up with what you’re doing, here are my free homeschool record templates – you can change them up as much as you need to in Excel.

Get your kids to keep a diary – whether it’s one sentence or a page. Don’t grade it on spelling or neatness – just let them write. It’s so much fun to look back on. Here was Ali’s when she was six, and here it was when she was ten. She still keeps a diary every day and is so happy that she has her entire life (back to being five) to go back and read.
Here are 80 Writing prompts to get kids to write. Use the prompts to inspire a sentence for small kids, or a paragraph for older kids.

Here’s a giant list of great books to read aloud to your kids. Also great is when you can get your older kids to read aloud to your younger kids.

Here are some early reader recommendations that are fun and high quality – if you can get books right now.

Here’s a math game that I made up – you don’t need anything but a printer and paper to play.

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Here’s another fun way to do math – how to teach division with remainders and then, the best part, to eat your remainders.

If you’re feeling the need to burn something, why not crayons? Here’s a fireworks painting we made with melted crayons. Very therapeutic in a time like this.

Playing store is a fun and engaging way to teach math, commerce, bargaining, price gouging, toilet paper shortages and more.

This is old, but here is my first and second list of iPad educational apps. There are probably lots of better learning apps now, but it’s a start.
Here are a few fun ways I encouraged writing letters when my little ones didn’t like to do so, including making a secret code for them to solve, or teaching them how to use invisible ink (with white crayons and watercolor paint.)
Here’s another fun Geography project – tracing the map, then quizzing everyone on what states they’ve visited and making a legend. This would be a fun thing to do to keep in contact with family members right now too – get your kids to call their grandparents, ask them what states they’ve visited, and start a conversation about those trips.
Speaking of Geography, this is the post behind my most watched YouTube video of all time, and it’s not just because of all of my personal re-watches because I love hearing Baby Ali pronounce the states (okay maybe half the watches are mine.) But this is a great time to learn all the states – so why not?

(Okay I had to stop and watch it again. It almost made me want another baby.)

That should be enough to keep you busy EVEN THOUGH I started out this post telling you to CHILL OUT and relax. So you do you. And don’t feel any pressure. Let’s all take a deep breath in, and a deep breath out. Except not in the direction of another person.

(And feel free to ask any questions in the comments.)

The Prodigal Fitbit Daughter.

January 22, 2018January 22, 2018 Rachel Callahan A Day in the Life, FitBit

I had been a happy FitBit wearer for three years. It motivated me, gave me beautifully geeky tracking tools, created new friendships, and fed my obsession with statistics.

Yet, at the beginning of October, I replaced my FitBit with an Apple Watch.

And then, on December 22, I found myself 126% overjoyed because I convinced Apple to give me a full refund for my Piece-Of-Crapple Watch (even though it was way out of its return period), and I bought myself a new FitBit.

Here is the story of that massive life turning point, if you happen to care.

I am an Apple person. I have a MacBook Pro, Chris has bought me every new iPhone since the 4 (except this year because what was the stupid deal with the 8 and X? And what if I wanted a 9??), and we have a couple iPads in the house. I love Apple products. So this year, instead of getting a new iPhone (8 or X, 8 or X, how can I make that decision?), I decided to try the watch. It was the first year that the watch had cellular, and I dreamed of being able to run, and track my runs, and answer texts and calls, without my giant iPhone 7 Plus strapped to my arm.

And after all – it’s Apple, so it has to work even better than a FitBit, right?

I almost changed my mind due to the heart rate monitoring. Although Apple said they gave this watch the feature of being able to let you know if you had heart issues (sounds like it’d have to be pretty accurate to do that), it also said it only checked your heart rate every ten minutes (how is that helpful.) For someone who had become accustomed to her FitBit checking her heart rate continuously (and for someone who has an illness that can be partially managed by tracking the heart rate and adjusting life to “fix” it when needed), this every ten minutes bit seemed stingy.

But surely Apple was better than FitBit. How could it not be? IT’S APPLE.

I’m sure the Apple watch is just lovely for people who use it for other things. Or for people who are not used to the supremacy of FitBit. But if you’re a FitBit loyalist and think you can get the same brilliantly simplistic tools out of Apple, you will be disappointed.

The first weekend I had mine, I could not get anything I wanted.

…It was checking my heart rate even less than it advertised – sometimes going 45 minutes between checks.
…The cellular didn’t work most of the time.
…The app I used to track runs (MapMyRun) didn’t get along with the Apple Cellular, and the app Apple preferred you to use (Nike+) didn’t get along with my app, which had all my historical data in it.
…The heart rate monitor would be wildly inaccurate, giving a reading of 220, immediately followed by 53. How are they supposed to be able to let you know if you have unusual spikes in heart rate if a.) they hardly ever measure it, and b.) when they do, it’s insanely wrong? FitBit figured my calorie burn based on my heart rate, whether accurate or not, and I loved that. How possibly could Apple even think they were doing that?
…The information the watch offered was both way too detailed to be useful and not giving the easy details I was used to, and therefore was not in the least bit motivating.
…The apps I use while I run, such as Spotify and Audible, did not have watch apps. So no music or books on tape while running.
…I had to charge the watch every…dang…day.

The only benefit I’d seen from the watch was the ability to text from the watch. And that was not worth what I’d paid for it and what I’d given up for it.

But I had made this decision, and I wanted it to work. I spent at least eight hours on the phone and on chat with Apple support that first weekend, methodically walking them through all of the problems with the watch interface. I had thrilling conversations such as when they told me to change a privacy setting so they could do a test…

And…

For some reason I believed them when they told me that it would get better, and that the heart rate data was accurate, and that the data was saving even if it didn’t show on my watch that it was.

I spent money on at least eight apps just trying to get the simple interface that FitBit had always given me so effortlessly.

Most of the apps were wildly information-overload with little actually useful information. I’m not a car. I don’t need five odometers. I want graphs.

One App even had a man who got fatter and skinnier throughout the day based on your activity – not the feeling I was going for.

The app called Healthview nearly gave me what I wanted,

But not a single app in the world could take the ugly Apple Watch heart rate data and give me the nice, simple, daily graphs that FitBit gave me.

I adored those graphs. I loved seeing those periods of red and knowing that I had run, and run well. I loved seeing every day stacked on top of the ones before it.

This was Apple’s idea of a weekly heart rate graph:

HOW is that helpful??

And the weird daily bar graph just wasn’t the same.

It did nothing to satisfy the desires of my over-analytical needs. And it just made my heart cry out for its old companion.

But I had paid a lot of money for that watch and I had missed the return window trying to give it the benefit of the doubt, so I tried my best to have a good attitude about it, and to convince myself that I liked it, that it was useful, and that I did not miss FitBit as if it were my soldier husband who was gone on a twenty-year deployment.

It was grocery shopping for Christmas that finally did me in. Noah and I had a lot to buy, and we were in the grocery store for a record long (for me) 45 minutes. As we walked up to the checkout line, I glanced at my watch. It hadn’t taken my heart rate the entire time.

Which meant I got no calorie burning credit for ALL THAT SHOPPING.

And if you can’t have an app tell you that you burned calories, did you even burn calories at all?

I quickly went into the raw data in the health kit of the phone (as the techs had taught me to do, when they were proving my data was there all along), and “AHA”’ed with malice.

My data was not there. The watch was useless.

I threw the groceries in the car in angry passion and immediately called Apple support. I told them their watch didn’t do what it was advertised to do and I just wanted to go back to FitBit SOOOOOO bad and please please please give me my money back.

The very kind and understanding Apple Senior Support Specialist put me on hold to confirm what the advertising said. She came back and said “Well they’ve changed the advertising to no longer say that it checks your heart rate every ten minutes. Now it says that it checks it regularly while you’re sitting, and occasionally while you’re active.”

(What even is the use of that?!)

She put me on hold again.

By the time that I had driven home, unloaded the groceries, cleaned out the Thanksgiving leftovers from the fridge to make room for the Christmas groceries, she returned with The Best News.

“The sales department has agreed to let you return the watch as a one-time courtesy since it doesn’t do as it was advertised at this time. You will get a full refund.”

I had tried not to allow myself to dream of this moment. But I had, and in my dream, I imagined that I would feel some sadness toward losing the Apple Watch.

But that imagining was wrong.

I whooped with joy and immediately got online, ordered myself the top of the line FitBit Ionic watch (I had given my former Altra HR Chris), set it to be picked up at the local Target, went to Target on the Friday before Christmas, and had my new FitBit Watch on as I drove to FedEx to ship my worthless Apple Watch back to whence it had come.

And I had $130 left over.

I am overjoyed to be reunited with my pleasing graphs and charts and my FitBit friends and challenges. The Ionic can do nearly everything I used my Apple Watch for, except better. AND now my FitBit system is significantly upgraded to be able to GPS track my exercise. The only two things I lost were the ability to talk to Siri (I can do that on my phone) and my ability to text from the watch (which I rarely used.)

And I am SO happy.

So, FitBit, I am sorry for ever leaving you, and for ever doubting that Apple could do it better. It was wrong. You are my Fitness Father. It won’t happen again.

On Needing More Chill.

September 15, 2017September 14, 2017 Rachel Callahan A Day in the Life

If we were playing the “I Have Never” game, until last week I could easily say “I have never bought a refrigerator.”

I am nearly 36 years old. Chris and I have been married for 16.5 years and have lived in three different dwellings. And we have never bought a refrigerator. Each house came with a fridge, and each fridge was old and “fine.”

We’re not the type of people to replace things that are “fine”, even if we don’t like them. We nearly vomit at people on House Hunters who flippantly say “I don’t like that shade of marble countertops but we can always rip them out and get a shade darker.”

So, in our minds, just because we never had a fridge that we felt any fondness toward did not mean that we should go out and buy a new one.

But we’ve now been in this house for over a decade, using a fridge that someone else bought. Somewhere in that fridge, there are decade-old germs that don’t belong to us. And, the fridge is pitiful. The veggie drawers are broken and melded shut, the light bulb, if barely shaken, decides not to work, and anything left in the freezer for longer than a fortnight can be guaranteed to have freezer burn. Oh and when you close the fridge door, be sure to pull the door in an upwards fashion or it will not seal.

So I wasn’t exactly sad when our fridge got continence issues and began peeing water on the shelves. I’m sure it could be fixed with a new dehumidifier core or some-odd piece like that, but DANGIT I am nearly middle-aged and I deserve my first new fridge.

Chris came home from work one day and I confronted him in front of the naughty fridge itself.

“I’m putting my foot down. I don’t care what your reservations or worries or logical reasons are. This is a ten to me*. WE NEED A NEW FRIDGE.”

He said, “Ummm…”

…then he decided to play with me.

“I don’t know…But getting a new fridge leads to…”

“NO IT WON’T. I know that’s what you said that one other time. We will not get new cabinets or new appliances or new countertops or an all new kitchen. I JUST WANT A FRIDGE.”

“Okay then.”

I said, “Thank you. I’ve already been shopping. I’ve picked out three options depending on how far you’re willing to let me change the status quo.”

He kindly obliged my most severely changed choice, wondering I’m sure why I felt the need to be so forceful in my fridge militiawoman presentation.

(I mean that fridge had been urinating on my blueberries – you’d have anger issues too.)

But then came measuring of the fridge hole. And depth and width, all of which I tackled all by myself. Like the adult I was convinced I was.

I measured and re-measured and re-measured again. I panicked in the middle of the night about whether a fridge would fit in that hole or if it was just all wrong for modern-day fridges. I picked a fridge and re-picked a fridge and re-picked again. The kids discovered that they loved fridge shopping and were amazed at the ones with double-tap glass doors and apps and background music and internal cameras so that you could look at the contents while you were at the grocery store.

I begged Chris to help me quadruple check my hole measurements before I had a nervous breakdown.

He again happily obliged, perhaps wondering why his wife was so frantically taken by this issue.

Finally, we bought a dang fridge.

Sight unseen, even, because that fridge did not have a display model.

It would not be delivered for a week, so I endured another seven days of fridge urination while waiting for it, becoming more and more hateful toward the current chiller of my fruits and vegetables.

But then it arrived.

And it was beautiful.

And I had no idea how very intense fridge delivery is. It’s the best “free delivery and installation” deal in the country, y’all.

After over TWO HOURS of getting it through the front door, removing the doors and hinges to get it through the kitchen door, getting the old fridge out, and peeling away those glorious sheaths of new appliance plastic, they finally were ready to slide it into the fridge hole.

(Note: all this time all of my fridge and freezer contents were sitting on my countertops. Nothing causes anxiety like all the slowly warming food.)

Which was the moment when Fridge Delivery Man #1 turned to me and said “I don’t think it’s going to fit.”

“What? No. It will fit. I measured five times.”

“It’s gonna be tight…I’m not so sure.”

“I will ax down that cabinet if we need to. IT WILL FIT.”

They looked at me with a measure of healthy fear, then positioned the fridge and began sliding. It banged the side of the cabinet. They repositioned, straightening it perfectly. This thing couldn’t go in a degree off-kilter or it wasn’t going to work.

They began sliding again, and this time it was going. Just barely. SO JUST BARELY.

They stopped and looked at me. #1 said “So do you want us to keep going?”

I scowled up my entire 36-year-old face. “This thing is not coming back out of my kitchen. OF COURSE I WANT YOU TO KEEP GOING.”

And they did.

And it fit.

The children are so taken by the cleanliness and organization and hugeness and brightness of it all. Ali said that getting a new fridge is the most exciting purchase ever and way better than a new car.

Even if I didn’t get the one with the apps and cameras.

And best of all? This fridge doesn’t need adult diapers.

* “It’s a ten to me” is fantastic marital communication advice that we got from good friends many years ago. You can only use it every now and then, but it’s an easy way to communicate “This is actually really really really seriously the most very importantest thing to me and I’m not being dramatic AT ALL.” This helps your spouse realize the gravity of the issue being discussed. I highly recommend it. And new fridges.

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