Hi there, my name is Anne and I’m Hester’s sister. I live in the Netherlands with my husband and our two boys, who are six and four years old. Usually, husband and I both work office jobs for four and a half days a week. However, schools in the Netherlands closed a few weeks ago, so we’ve been trying to combine home schooling, work, household chores and social distancing for weeks now. And with that amount of practice, I have some tips for you. The first bit I wrote a few weeks back after a week of homeschooling, the text after the photo is an update after several weeks of trying to combine our work, school work and home life.

Try to stick to your normal routine as much as possible. Get up at a reasonable time and get dressed. Our kids tend to stick to holiday or weekend mode if we let them wear pyjamas during the day. We don’t do school uniforms in the Netherlands, so they wear their normal comfy clothes.
If there is more than one adult working from home, try to work out a schedule. We use four shifts: early morning, late morning, early afternoon and late afternoon. Both of us get 4 to 5 hours of uninterrupted work-time in our makeshift home office, while the other one is with the children.
When your children are young, it’s quite likely you won’t get any work done while minding the children. If you’re lucky, you can get 15 or 20 minutes while they are busy playing, but don’t count on it. The only safe bet we have is the iPad, but even that gives us half an hour max.
Our children love to know what is going to happen during the day, so we use pictograms and make a schedule for them.
We try to create a mixture of school work (supplied by the teachers, by e-mail), things they can do on their own (building, simple board games, role playing, having eldest reading to youngest, colouring), things we need to help them with or that need supervision (more complex board games, reading to them, crafts, playing in the backyard), extra-curricular educational stuff we’ve found online (like theatre and drawing workshops or science experiments) and screen time (either playing a game on the iPad, watching tv or singing and dancing along with videos).
If at all possible, it is great to have a grandparent (or other relative/friend) read to your child or children via FaceTime, Skype, Zoom… It’s a triple win: they can’t come visit but love to see their grandchild, the children will love being read to and you’ll get some work done while being the parent in charge of home schooling.
For those of you with a garden: use it! Playing outside is a great way to get moving, use up energy and soak up some sunshine.
Please remember: you have a lot of balls to juggle. You can’t do everything perfect and you don’t have to. Keep your family save, entertained and happy.

guest blog Anne van Overbeek, school at home during lockdown

After five weeks of home schooling while working from home, I thought I’d give you an update. For the most part, we’re still using the same tactics we did when we started this, which I mentioned in my first part.

The schoolwork has changed a bit. When it became clear schools couldn’t start again soon, the teachers of our eldest brought us all his school exercise books and a schedule. Following that, he learns new stuff everyday for the main subjects in his year (maths, reading, writing and spelling). Our youngest gets a new video every day, in which his teachers do something educational, appropriate for his age group (counting, recognising letters, colours, putting things in order, movement games). He also loves doing work sheets and gets to pick one or two activities himself like playing restaurant, rhymes,

For me, creating things helps me to stay grounded and relax. So I try to do a craft activity with the boys every day. We love the Draw with Rob videos, in which children’s author and illustrator Rob Biddulph shows you how to draw his characters step by step. Find him on Instagram (@rbiddulph), Youtube or Facebook.

The boys love practicing magic tricks with their dad and doing science experiments. Quite a lot of them involve food colouring, water, vegetable oil, vinegar and/or baking powder. A very fun and tasty experiment was making our own butter from heavy cream. Our go-to sources for experiments are Pinterest and a Dutch website (www.proefjes.nl).

A few weeks ago we started with bingo sheets. On those, we put all the activities they have to do like schoolwork, the things we want them to do like crafts, experiments, board games and reading with oma (their Dutch granny), and things they love doing like LEGO, magic tricks and watching a funny tv show. They love crossing out things they’ve done and planning which activity to do on which day. Next week, they get to add an activity themselves. Find the sheet I use below. (ma di wo do vr are the days of the week ma maandag is monday, di for dinsdag or tuesday, wo is woensdag or wednesdag, do is donderdag or thursday and vr is vrijdag or friday)

Anne's home schooling bing sheet, guest blog on www.hestershandmadehome.com

We’re not sure yet what’s going to happen in the next few weeks. We’ll be homeschooling next week; after that there’s a two week holiday which will be spend at home. Maybe the primary schools will re-open early May, but we’ll see about that. We’ve found a sustainable flow so we’ll see wat happens. Take care of yourself and each other!