KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Casey Pruitt had been used to spending some extra time at her family home recently. The first lady of Tennessee Football had just given birth to the couple’s first girl, Shelby Pruitt, in late January.
Two months later, Casey and Jeremy made the decision to have their boys join mom and little sister at home during the school week after watching the impact COVID-19 had overseas.
“Out of extra precaution, because we have a newborn baby at home, we were like let’s pull the boys out of their little church preschool and home school them for a couple of weeks just to see where this virus goes,” Pruitt said.
But for 2-year-old Flynt and 4-year-old Ridge, being home with mom and not at preschool wasn’t going to be a vacation from academics. The mother of three went to work researching lessons and projects she could teach her boys from the safety of their Knoxville home.
“There are so many Pinterest pages there, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “And there are some things I’ve come up with on my own. Like, ‘Oh you know what I have these supplies, what can I make with them?’ While the kids are asleep at night I just come up with these ideas of some fun things to do with my kids.”
Pruitt reverted to her background in education and experience teaching art, something she used to teach on the side for a little extra cash, to create her daily lesson plans.
She’s sharing those daily lessons publicly with fellow parents on her Instagram account @thefootballwifelife
Each week has a theme like weather, animals or the Pruitt boys’ favorite pirates and Casey shares the how-to of teaching those lessons or executing the project on her page.
“In the archives section of my Instagram account I save all the different lessons,” she explained. “So you can look and say ‘okay I want to do weather week’ because you like some of the projects you see here. You can just click on the archive and go throughout our weather week and see step by step instructions.”
Casey also includes ways to simplify or add difficulty to projects, something she’s had to do herself while working with her boys.
“We tried to do a rainbow project for them and I had the exact same materials laid out for both of them,” she recalled. “Ridge was practicing his fine motor skills with using the scissors and Flynt (who’s two years younger) could not do it, the fine motor skills weren’t there yet with the scissor cutting. So I had to think on the fly because he still wanted to make a rainbow.”
You see all of the Pruitt’s quarantine projects on her Instagram page @TheFootballWifeLife.
