Ok, so there's a time spectrum for everything.  For tasks you want to accomplish, there is a minimum time you must meet to make progress. For diversions, distractions, and recreation, there's a maximum time after which you see a detriment to other parts of your life. To be completely honest with ourselves, there is a max time for work and minimum time for play: too much work and you're not seeing to your life, and not enough play and what is all the work for anyway? This goes double for kids. They won't stay engaged if there isn't a payoff, and they most definitely don't easily understand the notion that staring at a screen for too long for games and videos can have unintended consequences. Being told time is up is never anything but disappointing. What's working in our house is an open conversation about balance. In order to get video game time, responsibilities have to all be met. It helps to have rewards that are on more than one scale. It's hard to b...

Hello and welcome to my home-ed blog.👋 I'm Nick , and I'm a parent with littles in the CJUSD , and I want to reach out and help parents meet the new challenge of supplementing their own students' educational experience in this historic time. I see the huge😱 number of resources we've been flooded with, and it occurs to me that it can be overwhelming for people who had no intention of home-schooling or any materials at home aside from the internet and maybe a printer. First: yes, there's a big pile of resources available, but obviously there's not a discussion page attached to every item and it's hard to tell which ones are worth the effort of setting up. Second: the stuff on the list is specific to what's been discussed and approved for district use, but does not go into free and open source solutions. here's a place I'll probably spend several updates discussing. There are a lot of apps that are free, useful, fun, and there are no advertiseme...