A Day in the Life: The Diffenbaugh Family

Hello and happy Wednesday! We have another A Day in the Life post for you. Today, Julie Diffenbaugh shares how their family intertwines everyday life and responsibilities with homeschooling. Enjoy!

I’m going to fall back on the standard SLOCA greeting. We are the Diffenbaughs. This is our 7th year at SLOCA. Our kids Will (6th) and Claire (2nd) are on Track A. We live outside of Paso Robles and have been active in the SLOCA sports programs (K-4 and LMS). The only difference to this introduction than normal is that this year we chose to follow the SLOCA @Home program. 

Despite the craziness in the outside world (and that whirling around in Mom and Dad’s head), we saw a lot of positive outcomes from the COVID Spring. For three months, my kids did not leave the home property and we saw a dramatic change in them; a positive one. They were happier, worked together better, and were able to better process hard information (we still had meltdowns, just not as dramatic as before!). I fully believe the reason for this was the increased play, increased imaginative play, increased family time, and lack of schedule. 

As both of our kids are in their “rollover” year in their classes and they knew (as well as I knew) what was expected of them, we decided to take advantage of what we felt like was a gift: one year with no outside schedule telling us when and where to be. We were the teachers, so we could decide on the school schedule. And for socialization, we would arrange playdates. 

At almost two months into the SLOCA @Home program, it hasn’t all gone as we expected but some of it is even better. 

6:30 a.m. – Claire comes in carrying the latest Boxcar Children book she is reading. Usually, Will is up by 6:15, but we are all recovering from a busy 4 days of roping and camping and no one is moving at their normal pace. (We’re thankful to have hobbies that are naturally socially distant. It’s pretty easy to be 6’ apart when you’re on horseback!) 

7:00 a.m. – Will stumbles in with his latest book in the Redwall series and snuggles next to sister. 

7:45 a.m. – The kids take their turns in the shower and get ready. Normally my kids would ride bikes with the neighbors at 8:00 am (before the neighbors start their daily schedule of distance learning). However, it is 26 degrees outside and we have delayed the bike riding in hopes the neighbors have a break later in the day when it’s warmer. This means we don’t have to rush through breakfast, which is a good thing since we are already behind in the morning routine!  

8:15 a.m. – Claire is finishing breakfast when Will finally sits down to eat his oatmeal. We love Mad Libs and play it often in the car. We complete the Huck Finn Mad Libs for LMS this week and laugh at our results. We then discuss what SLOCA character traits that Tom Sawyer embodies. We decide that he definitely has courage, resilience, and a certain kind of resourcefulness. 

My two kids move at completely opposite speeds and learn very differently. I have learned so much over the last seven years of schooling through SLOCA to help teach my oldest, who learns in a completely different style and speed than I do. I have learned to really use the manipulatives; almost everything we do at SLOCA (math, writing, grammar, spelling, etc.) builds upon each other, so we are just looking for them to have increased understanding — to help my child as much as needed to help him gain confidence or understanding, but then to back off. Enough of my side note. Claire unloads her suitcase and sorts her laundry into piles as requested. I then hear her singing in the garage playing with our 6-month-old kittens (when do they become cats?).

9:00 a.m. – The kids ride their bikes a ¼-mile down to the barn to feed the horses, cows, and chickens. 

9:30 a.m. – I call the kids on their joint flip phone to see where they are. Randy has shown up at the barn to hook up to a flatbed trailer; they are helping him load a quad and change a battery. They are also cleaning up extension cords and such from their chicken coop building the night before, so they will be a little longer than planned. 

9:50 a.m. – The kids return with green onions pulled from their garden. They wash them and then we look over their grids to decide what we want to work on today. We have been looking at the grid as a weekly unit and not a day-to-day, which has helped a lot in figuring out what we know needs to be done. We know we need to do math and grammar every day (and copy work for Claire), but the rest can work in and out of our schedule. We decide to ride horses after lunch when it’s a bit warmer. Yesterday, we listened to 2 chapters of Tom Sawyer when we went to drop off and pick up my mom for cataract surgery. Then we were so tired when we returned that we cuddled on the couch and listened to another 3 chapters and then discussed it at lunch. We tend to look at the grid as the whole week and I always try to be ahead in reading, grammar, and spelling (as there are busy weeks where the grammar and spelling are skipped). 

10:10 a.m. – The delivery guy with the porta-potty for the dressage clinic I am hosting this weekend calls and needs to know where to put the bathroom. The kids run down in the side-by-side and show him where to put it. 

10:30 a.m. – We finally start school for the day. For the first month of school, the weather was so warm that we worked/played in the morning and started the school day about 11:30 when we came in for lunch. However, with the colder weather, our schedule is adjusting and the plan is to do school in the morning and work/play outside in the early afternoon when it is warm. 

They are in good moods, so we decide to start with math. Will puts on his headphones to listen to music while he sits in a comfy chair to work on his mental math practice sheet. Claire gets her PVD’s (place value discs) and sits at the kitchen counter to work on subtraction. Four years ago with Will, I found that I could use blue painters tape on the counter to create a 1, 10, 100, 1000 chart and it was so much easier than using paper. I have re-created that chart for Claire on our kitchen counter and she goes to work explaining to me how to subtract 50 from 345. I am a big fan of manipulatives and have found that I will spend as much time as possible using manipulatives, even if means decreasing the book problems. While I prep dinner, Claire then uses two dice to slowly subtract two-digit numbers from 500 and explains the process to me. She is working on renaming tens and hundreds in subtraction. She has a good grasp on renaming, so I am using this as time for practice to confirm we understand the concept and process. 

11:10 a.m. – Will asks if Claire is ready for a break and a dancing song. They are currently obsessed with Jimmy Buffett, Alan Jackson, and George Strait (last month it was Journey and Steve Earle), and they end up dancing to three songs before we refocus back on school. 

11:25 a.m. – Will decides to work on Grammar. He is about 3 lessons ahead in Grammar, but I like keeping it that way. Claire finishes her math game and chooses to start her copy work. Her hand cramps halfway through, so she takes a break and goes into the garage where I hear her singing to her kitties while I reheat leftovers for lunch.  

11:55 a.m. – Lunch is served and the kids put on a Liberty Kids video while they eat. I try to make lunch another learning time. We usually play a math game, talk about a book, or listen to a book. Due to the current history period, the Liberty Kids videos are a special treat. 

12:25 p.m. – The video and lunch are done. The kids ask to have some quiet time versus their normal recess. I know how tired they are and I have some computer work to finish up, so I encourage them to do so. 

1:00 p.m. – We clean up the house. The kids put away clothes they folded yesterday, vacuum and mop the living area while I empty the dishwasher and put in another load of wash. 

1:30 p.m. – Claire plays with the kitties outside while Will practices piano. I head across the road to pick up hay and ask them to meet me down at the barn when they are done practicing piano. 

2:00 p.m. – The kids show up while I am exercising my horse and go directly to their leather workshop, which has tools they inherited after my dad passed away. Will is working on stamping as he wants to work on a belt and Claire is stamping a bookmark. 

2:30 p.m. – I am unloading hay and see that the kids are now playing in the arena where they have been building a city. I give them 10 more minutes and then they catch their horses to ride. 

3:30 p.m. – The kids ask to go on a trail ride so I send them off while I blow out the barn. 

4:30 p.m. – The horses are put away and fed. Kids ride their bikes to take down trash cans for two neighbors and meet me at the house. 

5:00 p.m. – The kids come back and Will spends about 20 minutes reading a school book to Claire. Claire then finishes her copy work and draws a picture to go with it while listening to music. Will works on his IEW rough draft and is stuck on a sentence so we talk through several different ideas. He doesn’t like any of them, but it stimulates him to think of his own. With perfect timing, Claire has a good song and asks if they can take a break for another “dancing song” moment.  The 15 minutes of dancing and singing are well spent as Will is re-energized. Claire and I go to the hallway to work on her spelling lesson for the week. A few years ago, after I felt that Will had a good grasp on the alphabet, I bought magnets for the letter tiles and screwed a magnetic whiteboard into the hallway so we could leave the letter tiles up. That and the blue painter’s tape are two of my favorite homeschool hacks!  

6:30 p.m. – Randy is home so we sit down for dinner and play Rummy. During the spring, we played Rummy at every meal (literally BLD for 3 months!), but due to the warm weather, we have not been playing games at dinner. Claire is determined to get us back on track to playing a game a night. 

7:30 p.m. – Randy starts reading Johnny Tremaine to them.

8:30 p.m. – Lights out. One good thing about a time change is that we are getting closer to returning to our 8:00 p.m. bedtime. 

We had good attitudes today and it was fairly easy to keep the kids engaged. Not every day is like that and I have learned to be flexible. On those days, we snuggle and get ahead in our reading, get more exercise, do mental math while shooting hoops, verbally discuss the literature and history while on a hike, and/or have time to play in the dirt.

Thank you so much Julie for sharing with us.

SLOCA families, are you interested in sharing with the community your “day in the life”? Please email [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!