Online education with Silcoates

This week has seen the start of the Zoom school lessons for the boys – well only Elliot so far but Oliver’s start on Thursday.

It has to be said that the teachers have done a brilliant job translating over to video lessons, with Elliot’s English teacher leading a particularly impressive lesson yesterday. She totally commanded the virtual room and kept all that were online, attentive and on point – great work Miss Smith.

Later in the day, Simon had not been aware that Elliot was in a lesson, and the ensuing flatulence was not a particularly welcomed noise for the virtual lesson….. whoops

All joking aside, the education from Silcoates through this tough period has been really very well put together and has kept both boys engaged and on point. Oliver has needed more extra motivation in order to get going and keep going but Elliot has taken to the approach like a duck to water.

We are fortunate that the boys both have a laptop and that there is space in the dining room for it to become a virtual office during the day – shame that the real office in the garden is not yet finished with the renovations as that would make it better still – hopefully we will be finished down there by this time next week – the photos below should demonstrate the current progress – we are waiting for the plaster to dry. (ignore the bikes, they are just being stored in here short term since all of the office furniture is in the container, hence there was no room for the bikes

Busy time in lockdown…

We have had a busy start to this week of school holidays.

Vicky has been busy painting the garden furniture and Simon has been busy in the garage. We now have a doorway in between the old garden storage area and the office – in readiness for making it into two offices OR an office and a gym.

Also, half of the garden store is prepped for drywall along with power and networking AND preparation for underfloor heating.

Next job is to prepare the walls in the main office with timber for drywall. To do this we need to manoeuvre the office furniture around to remove some / all of the existing flooring = a BIG job.

Finally we need to find a supplier of drywall plus more timber and other goodies to either deliver to the house or click and collect.

It will be terrific when done but seems to be a much bigger job than we first thought…..