Hurricane Florence is on its way and we homeschool.

Hurricane Florence is on its way and we just started our school year on a nice strong note.  I don’t want to stop now!

Hurricane Florence is on its way and our area has already seen record rainfall.  The ground is saturated and can’t hold another drop.

I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but Hurricane Florence is on its way and we live in Virginia.

We don’t live near the coast, but we DO live in the Shenandoah Valley where we’ve seen an incredible amount of rainfall this year.  The Shenandoah River has flooded several times and likely will again. And did I mention that our house loves to let the water in?  Yeah.  Not fun.

Preparing As A Family

We’ve been talking about this storm for quite a while now, in our family. The older kids have been pretty matter-of-fact about it, reasoning out what we need to do together to prepare and praying a lot for our area and all areas that will be affected by this storm.

My 3-year-old doesn’t even really know what’s going on, so he’s fine.

But my 7-year-old is terrified and I can’t really blame her. It’s hard when your 7 to see such a huge storm coming and not know what to do. She’s too young to be able to see past it. She’s too old to be able to ignore it. And so we printed out this preparation checklist:

And we put our 7-year-old in charge of checking things off as we completed them.

This empowered her like nothing I could have said or done for her. She now has power over this storm and how it will affect her and her family. She now has something to DO to make the outcome better.  She can SEE the results of our efforts right there.  And she can imagine after the storm, how we might need to use these emergency supplies.

We’ve completed our preparations and she’s as ready as I can make her. We’ve had a lot of discussions about how she isn’t alone. She doesn’t have to face this storm by herself. She has her family here to help her through it. We’ve talked about how making sure we are prepared makes it possible for us to help others who ARE alone. She has power over this storm, now. And I wonder if this technique will help her have power over OTHER storms in her life.  But that’s for another post.  🙂

How have YOU prepared?

Hurricanes and Homeschooling:

We have continued our morning and afternoon studies through all of this prep. What made it easier is that we’ve had quite a lot of that checklist on hand anyway and we just needed to check supplies and expiration dates etc.  🙂  But the other part is that we needed to stick to this routine to keep ourselves from focusing too much on what was coming.  Someone mentioned on Facebook that waiting for a hurricane to hit was like waiting to be attacked by a turtle. You know it’s coming.. .It just takes too long!  So we keep going with our studies.

I have prepared a great deal of material that does NOT require a computer or listening to an MP3 or anything like that so that if we do lose power for up to several weeks as they told us to prepare for, well… we can keep learning. I printed some games from the Little Learning Lovies catalog to keep my younger kids happily entertained and moving around so we don’t all go stir crazy if we’re stuck at home for 2 weeks.  We also prepared lots of puzzles and board games to play as we laid in our supply of candles and lamp oil.  We’re almost looking forward to it! lol

Webcams to watch the storm come in!

These webcams are in the perfect position to see the hurricane come in.  There’s one looking out over the ocean and one under the water.  Very cool.

Here’s a map of where these cameras are: