CECILIE - HOME SCHOOL IN PERTH, WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Home school in Perth, Western Australia

26 March 2019

The Australian Government is FINALLY starting to take the Corona virus seriously. However, they have been sending very mixed messages about whether schools should close or not (unlike in Europe). They have said that they will keep schools open, but parents can choose to keep their children at home! If that isn’t a mixed message, I don’t know what is! 

In any case, we decided to keep our two girls, Anna Maria aged 14 and Zoe aged 9 at home since the beginning of this week. Of course we made it very clear to them that we expected them to still ‘go to school’ during school hours (although we have abandoned the extra homework J). Poor teachers. Not only do they still have to teach kids and provide online material to kids who are at home, they also have to worry about catching COVID-19.

The way home schooling works for us is that the kids know their schedule for each day by heart and pretty much keep those exact schedules for each subject at home too. Sure, some adaptations are needed. For example, for humanities, Zoe had the great idea of looking up facts about different countries and writing about them side by side (see a photo below for an example). Anna Maria is of course still doing her various assignments, and submitted a French one electronically this morning. 

They also have PE (we bought a spin bike a couple of weeks ago, and we are very lucky to have our own pool – see photos below) and music (see Zoe practising the cello below). All that can of course also be done at home. 

The girls are doing great, they do not seem to be too concerned, and have started to connect electronically with their friends. Right now they are having fun in the pool! Every evening, we take a family walk around the block (twice; about 3 km). Nikos and I have our ‘gym’ in the garage too (see below for photo).

We had news this morning that the Australian Government finally decided to close schools from 3 April for the foreseeable future, so getting into a home school routine is critical to make everyday life work. 

Cecilie  -  Perth