In Their Own Words: Teaching Triplets at Home

The Albay-Kam family has adapted well to learning from home.

By CSF Dad Sunny Kam

Sunny Kam and his wife, Marjorie Albay, are the parents of triplets Azalea, Isla, and Grayson, who began Kindergarten as CSF Scholars this past fall. When the Covid-19 outbreak led schools to close their doors and move online last month, like so many parents nationwide, Sunny and Marjorie dove right in to recreate the school environment at home. Here, Sunny explains the family’s new daily routine:

My wife, Marjorie, and I are by far no experts, but we found a few things that have worked for our family.

We keep the trio on their regular schedule for bedtime. We put them down by 6:15pm and they usually wake up 12 hours later. So by 6:30am, I sit with the kids and we eat breakfast – nothing fancy. I usually reheat the muffins or waffles we make the night before. We eat for about 30 minutes.

After breakfast and a bit of free play, we start their daily “school” schedule at 8am. In effort to help retain normalcy, we have them in school uniform gym sweats so it’s comfortable, but at the same time it replicates a “school atmosphere.”

Our trio have been working hard on their teachers’ assignments. Everything is pushed out by Google Classroom. I believe they have a total of 11 classes, seven of which are from their Kindergarten classroom teacher and the rest are electives like gym, Italian, etc.

Marjorie and I look over the subjects and print out the required worksheets the night before and rearrange a makeshift agenda, depending on the “classes” to be taught the following day.

Luckily, I have Marjorie directly teaching our three, while I remotely teach my own group of 8th graders and juggle all the phone calls, texts, emails, video conferences, and team meetings.

In between all the craziness, we find time to cook lunch and dinner. It definitely has not been easy, but the silver lining is I’m grateful that I’m able to have more family time.

Fondly,

Sunny & Marjorie

The triplets keep a regular schedule and wear school uniform gym sweats to replicate the school atmosphere.

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