Now more than ever, as teachers, parents and humans, we need to show strength where we can, solidarity and perseverance.  We constantly promote the importance of grit and resilience to our children, now is an amazing opportunity to show them what this looks like in practice.

While searching for loo roll and hunting for pasta, remember that having a limited range of cooking ingredients does provide you the chance to try new recipes.  Thankfully, the electricity and internet are still working and with Master Chef on tv, be inspired to use different ingredients and search the web for more interesting ways of using what you already have at home.  I pickled some red onions yesterday and had them on a cheese sandwich.  Not five star nosh but bloomin’ tasty non-the less.  I’ve now just ordered a load of white wine vinegar so I can experiment with pickling other things.  Here’s the recipe if you want to give it whirl – Click Here.  Needless to say, I would still be a pickling virgin had I not been restricted on my shopping.  Positive number one!

My son spent a lot of his evening writing a Coronavirus news bulletin.  While I can’t confirm it was all scientifically accurate, one of the best bits was that ‘staying off work and school means that there is lots of time for family fun.’  As teachers and early years practitioners, you spend so much of your time nurturing and developing the children of others, that our own have been known to take a back seat at times.  So, for those of us lucky enough to be at home with our own children next week, let’s really make it time well spent.  Let’s show them, even more fervently, how much they are loved and cherished and how much we enjoy spending time with them.  Be guided by what they want to do, as much as what you think they should be doing while they’re not at school.

A few things I’m hoping to do with my son over the next few weeks include:

1. Homeschooling, using the TTS activity packs as a basis for covering all the subjects he has at school. He’s started already and is particularly enjoying the art section.

2. Using Duolingo to learn French in the hope that our holiday still goes ahead in May

3. Taking the time to make music together. He plays the drums, I play piano and we have a guitarist in the house.  We haven’t done music together since the Christmas holidays so this is right on the top of our list.  And even if you don’t play an instrument, get some karaoke videos up on YouTube and have a good old sing song!

4. Great for your body, amazing for your mind.  Subscribe to one of the many yoga YouTube channels out there and spend some time together stretching, balancing and centring yourselves.  It’s amazing how ‘in the moment’ it causes you to be and even if you feel stressed, angry or emotional beforehand, I pretty much guarantee you’ll notice an improvement after a short yoga session.

5. Pickling things (see above).

6. Having more conversations.  I don’t yet know what about, but I don’t think it really matters, I’m just going to enjoy picking his brain and allowing him to pick mine and learn from each other.  There’s a strong chance that much of this conversation will be poo or dinosaur related, but I can live with that if he’s willing to talk to me about how he’s feeling and what he thinks about various other topics

One of the things none of us get to do enough of, I’m guessing, is reading for pleasure.  What better time to crack open that novel you’ve been dying to read for ages, the one that has nothing to do with work and everything to do with escaping into another, Coronavirus free, world?

The final thing I recommend doing is appreciating the small things.  Look out of the window, see how nature continues despite what is happening: the sky, the birds, the emergence of spring (I saw my first lambs last weekend, soooo cute).  Enjoy being able to have a glass of wine (or 4) on a school night, wearing jogging bottoms and t shirts with slippers, cups of tea or coffee whenever you want them and being able to go to the toilet whenever you need to.  Actual luxury!

Needless to say, there will be a lot of different people, in lots of different situations over the coming weeks.  But we all have one thing in common; we can choose to see the positives, because there definitely are some, even if you have to look really hard to find them.  And remember, schools will be open again soon and it will, as always, be like you’ve never been away.