 Hello, I'm Becca King Reid for CTV with this week's coronavirus update for Santa Cruz County. Schools are now closed, so this week's focus is on education. Later we'll be talking to homeschooling expert Brandi Jordan about how to homeschool while working from home. But first, the update. Here's where we are. In a letter to families this week, Santa Cruz County Superintendent of Schools Ferris Sabaz stated, teachers throughout Santa Cruz County have been working diligently to prepare and plan for distance learning. We all intend to provide students from transitional kindergarten through 12th grade with learning materials that ensure their access to high quality education throughout the closures. Some of the educational content may be delivered virtually. Sabaz acknowledged that this could be a stretch for some family budgets, but offered a solution. Several internet service providers in the community are now offering free or low-cost internet service to low-income families. Visit sccoe.link.internet to see if you qualify for this program. Sabaz insists internet access is key to help facilitate our efforts to offer engaging distance learning. And education is just one of the important things schools provide for students. Many of our local children depend on the free or low-cost breakfast and lunch programs. Now even though the schools are closed, the kitchens have not. Schools will continue to provide an opportunity for families to drive through and pick up meals for their children. Parents can locate their distribution center on the interactive map at the address noted below. If you or someone else needs further food assistance, contact Second Harvest Food Bank or call 211 for more information. You may be wondering how you can provide educational experiences for your children between now and when the distance learning plan becomes available. Well, here are a few options. KQED is broadcasting a California State Standards Aligned Educational Television Schedule. The programming runs each weekday on KQED Plus, that's Local Channel 10. The programming is time blocked for different ages and grade levels. The programming runs from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and covers transitional kindergarten through 12th grade. You can see the KQED Plus TV schedule at the website noted below. Schoolastic is offering free online classes daily for students from free kindergarten to 9th grade at its Learn at Home website. Speaking of learning at home, earlier this week when Governor Newsom issued a statewide shelter-in-place order, he gave no indication when the order would end, but said he doesn't expect schools to reopen this year. Schools aren't the only things that are closing their doors. Businesses too are closing up shop and people are expected to work at home. Life has changed in an instant for parents who are now expected to maintain their job performance and educate their children at the same time in the same place. My next guest has some great advice for parents who are now homeschooling while working from home. We recorded our interview earlier this week by a teleconference because we're all working from home. Take a look. Brandy Jordan is a former elementary school teacher turned homeschooling on with over a decade of homeschooling experience under her belt. She is passionate about providing homeschool families with resources and support. Welcome Brandy. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Oh, this is going to be so great for parents. Right now we have a whole bunch of parents who are struggling with a whole new lifestyle. Now if one of them were to come to you, what advice would you give them to just to give them a good feeling moving forward? Well, first I would say I'm so sorry that you are put in this situation that you did not choose because homeschooling when you choose it is one thing, but homeschooling when you have no choice is very different. So I'm so sorry that you are faced with this situation because it's hard. It is not an easy thing even when you make the choice. So I would say just have a lot of grace with yourself. Be patient with your learning curve as you teach your children and be patient with your children because they didn't choose this change either and it's hard on them. So just be kind to yourself. And if things are not working, take a break. You don't have to push through when things are really challenging. It's okay to kind of step back, take a deep breath and just regroup. It's totally okay. Up until now, most people have been working in one place and coming home and being with their children and maybe helping with homework and maybe doing enrichment projects, but they haven't been doing the same thing. So now they've got competing commitments. They're in their home. They've got their kids. They've got their work. It's all there. How do they navigate the different chunks of activities that they're responsible for now? That's really hard because you're putting a situation where your employer still, like you said, expects you to maintain your job performance and your kids' teachers are expecting them to get support as they're learning. So I would say just rely on the resources you have available. If the teachers are there to help your children, rely on that. If your boss is very willing to be graceful and understand that you have children at home, take advantage of that. Don't hesitate to say, look, this is what I'm going through. This is my new reality. And I need you to be more understanding of the fact that I can't jump on a conference call for three hours and have no disruptions going on. Exactly now because we can't even invite someone into our home to help us. You can't call your grandma because that would be deadly for her. So we really can't get help from outside. It all has to come from within the home. It really does. And that's hard for a parent to manage on the weekends. Just taking care of everything and managing the house and a child, but then managing work and school on top of that is super challenging. So you're not alone and this team will pass. So you've said the start of the day is how you start the day kind of sets the tone. So how would you suggest parents start each day? When we start homeschooling. I found that it was really helpful to just sit the kids down and sort of have a morning meeting. So you can think of that like work, you know, where you have a morning meeting at work. Everybody tells what's going on, only you're sort of giving them a schedule of what's going to happen. So today, you know, mom has a conference call from two to three. So everybody's going to be quiet for a month. But we're going to have language arts in the morning and we'll take a break and have a snack. Maybe we'll go for a walk. My mom has work to do or dad has work to do and just give them an outline of the day so that they know what to expect so that it doesn't come as a surprise to them when you suddenly have to jump on a call and they're forced to be quiet. They already have the knowledge that you're going to be asking them to do something quietly for a while. That worked great for us and it's just a nice way to start the day. Yeah. So it kind of gets you off. Here's what we're doing today. You know, and so there isn't, sometimes when you, I was a freelancer for a long time and if you're not careful, you can, your day can slip away. You can, if you don't have, like I'm starting here at this time doing this, you can all of a sudden be doing the dishes or vacuuming and you really ought to be writing that report. So I think the parents are going to have that kind of competing commitments now. They've got their work and they've got their home and they're really, when you work at home sometimes and work never ends because you're always in your office. So how do they divide up? How do they draw a line between when they're working, when they're schooling, when they're home? Right. So I think the first thing is everybody gets up, gets dressed in the morning, put your shoes on because there's something about putting your shoes on. Okay. The day is getting started. It's time to work. It's time to do school. Make you stay in your pajamas all day. Chances are it's probably not be as productive as you hope. So do that first and then just set a schedule for yourself but be flexible with it. So if you know that your kids are going to be doing online classes with their teachers, I'm not sure if California's implementing that or if teachers are going to be doing online schooling, but if they are, you know, your students can work during that time and you can be working on whatever project you're working on for work. Kind of set a time for your students so that they know exactly when they're expected to work and when playtime is and when break time is and much. But keep in mind that you have to be flexible because everything changes so quickly. So is it a good idea to have a space, like an outline place in home where you do this? Absolutely. Absolutely. If you have a separate office that you can use, use that. If you don't, the kitchen table works great. And you can make bins for each child with their work and just pull them out during school time. Then when the school day is over, put them back in and make it home again. But have that separation so that you don't feel like you're working all the time and your kids don't feel like it's school all the time that there is that home family time as well. And you had a great way of beginning and ending the day for your kids to get them more in the school mode. Can you share that? Sure. So when we started, after we would have our morning meeting, we'd be like, okay, it is time to go to school and they would put on backpacks and we would have their school stuff in the backpacks and they would walk out the front door and they would walk around to the side gate and let them in the side gate as the teacher, welcome them to school. And then we would start. And then at the end of the day, we would reverse it and go around. So if you have a side gate or a back gate and they can come in safely that way, that might be a way to do it. You could also pack everybody in the car, drive around the block and come home. And just to give yourself that kinesthetic actual movement of separating the day between work and school and family time and home. That really helps. That really does help. I used to have an office that was attached to the house, but I could get to it from outside. So I'd go out and come in through the back other door. Right, because otherwise you're working and you're doing school all day and it gets to be too much. Yeah. And you never feel like you stopped. You're always working. So I liked your idea of you could do it on the kitchen table, put everything away because then you really don't see that stuff or if you have a room, you can close the door. It makes a nice celebration. Now one thing you also mentioned to me was that, which makes total sense, but I hadn't thought of it before, but the school day is not as long as a work day. So kids are really only learning for two or three hours, especially if they're doing it in a condensed place like at home where they're not waiting for other kids to line up or come in or go out or file papers. And parents, they're working eight hours. So how do you handle that? Right. When you think about it, when your kids go to school, it seems like a long time throughout the day, but there's a lot of that time that is transition time and lunch time and maybe going to locker time. So there's a lot of downtime that's not actually instruction. And when you're homeschooling, all of that is super condensed. So all they have to worry about is completing their work because they don't have to wait for 20 other students to finish. They can just, when they're finished, they're finished. So for us, when we had our kids finish early with things, then we would have busy boxes or like bags of things that had puzzles or activities that they could do quietly while I still worked. And yes, screen time is okay. Like if you have to supplement with screen time, go for it. There's tons of educational movies. There's tons of things that they can watch on the internet. The zoos and aquariums are having wonderful live animal cameras that they can watch and learn while you're still working. And that's okay too. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. So there's some sort of positive stuff to do when your when your parents are still working. That's a good idea. So, you know, what about older kids? I think it would be, you kind of got the feeling elementary school children, you tell them what you're going to be doing all day. They do it and they follow through and they play with the video cameras after. But is there anything different about high school students? They're a little more independent. They study on their own more. How do you, how is it different with them? Well, I have two teenage boys. One is a senior and one is a sophomore. So you would love to think that teenagers would be very self-motivated and they'd get up on their own and start work, but that's really not the case at all. So I would encourage you to work with them to set up a schedule too. And you might have to remind them and, you know, stay on top of them as much as you do your younger kids. Because if you don't, the tendency is to kind of slack off to not do the work because it's easier to be on their phones and communicating with their friends. So it's, I wish that it, I wish there was a magic solution for teenagers, but you really do have to be on top of them just as much. And yeah, so it's just attention. So accountability. So what, what, what do you, what are your accountability tools as you're, as you're getting students to work at home? Yeah. So we make sure that everything that they have to do that day is written down and then at the end of the day, we check it. And if they've had trouble, it gives us something to help them with because they can independently work on their, their assignments and that's okay. But it is really good to go back and make sure that they've actually completed them because there have been times where we said, you know, have you done all of your assignments? And the answer has been yes. But in actuality, there's pieces missing or there's things that need to be adjusted. So make them accountable and check that. And it can be at the end of the day after you're done work. It doesn't have to be during your work day. That makes sense. So one of the things I'm thinking when you speak about a cannibal in going over their work, like not, not most of the parents, I mean, some of them are going to be trained teachers, but most of them won't be. And some of them would just won't have, as my brother calls it, the way. So how, what is, how can you, what advice do you have for parents who are trying to teach their student a skill that is new for them or just new for the child? How, how is the best way? What's the best teaching attitude? Right. I would say, again, be kind to yourself. It's okay to admit that you're not sure how to teach something. Googling it is totally okay too. There have been many times when we're not sure about a certain skill or how to teach something in a way that's going to reach our kids the best. So we Google it. And there's lots of resources out there. Khan Academy is a great math resource. We love using them, especially for older, higher level math, because there's a lot of things I don't remember from, you know, going through high school myself, like geometry was not my forte. So being able to get supplements like that, like Khan Academy and use them and kind of brush up on the skill before I have to teach it to my child is very helpful. OK, well, speaking of resources, Brandy has provided some very nice resources for you and we'll have links to those at the end of the show. And I want to thank you so much for coming today. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you feel you'd like to share with parents before we go? I would just say, you know, just go with it. Just do your best. It doesn't have to be perfect. Your child is going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to get through this and it's OK if you don't like homeschooling. You didn't make the choice to do it. Nobody's going to judge you for not liking it. Just do your best. And if you have questions or you need help, reach out. There are so many people that are willing and ready to help parents who are thrust into the situation. Thank you so much. Where can people find out more from you? You can find out more at MamaTeaches.com and I actually created a page for your community. So it's MamaTeaches.com backslash Santa Cruz. So they'll be back to find information there. Oh, that's great. So it's MamaTeaches.com backslash Santa Cruz. Yep. You're so generous. Thank you so much for being here today. I know parents are really going to enjoy your printables and this interview. Thanks, thanks, thanks. Now, one more thing before we go. Sadly, when disaster strikes criminals, do not take a holiday. Right now, hackers are trying to lure concerned Americans into downloading a malware that's disguised as a Johns Hopkins map of the coronavirus pandemic. Visiting the website infects the user's device with an information stealing program that can collect a lot of sensitive data. No one is sure how it's being spread, but email, internet ads and text are the likely culprits. Some with Android phones have received text with links to an app that tracks the coronavirus. When downloaded, the app will allow criminals to track you through your smartphone's camera and microphone. It can even steal your text messages. You can find a safe map courtesy of the Mercury News at the link below. All the links I've mentioned today will be listed on CT's Facebook page. You can find our page at Facebook.com slash CTV Santa Cruz County. That's our update for the week ending March 21st. Thank you and take care.