Child-led, emergency homeschooling
Horray! Today I finished a week of homeschooling and am sharing some learnings. I‘ve received some really useful advice from friends and family which has been great for us, so want to pay it back with some up to date feedback and examples.
In many ways, the opportunity to homeschool is a golden one that has always been on our minds. Perhaps we could do it, perhaps we should not.
At the moment we have no choice, just like most of the global parent population.
Every day I asked our 2 kids what needs improving, what is going well and what could you do if you could sprinkle magic fairy dust over it (‘it’ — being homeschool).
This is what they said:
What needs improving
- Make joint activities age-appropriate. We have a 7 and a 3-year-old and the older one said he did not enjoy the nursery rhyme singing at the end of the day. Naturally on day 2, I changed it up and danced to their song requests instead(the Karaoke version so they can get to practice reading!)
- Think more carefully about their academic levels. After presenting one of them with a worksheet they struggled with, I was left feeling frustrated and they were left feeling incapable. After this feedback, I focussed on the specifics of the points that he was struggling with and thought of a cool way to get the point across. Specifically, it was about telling the time. I had to work hard to imagine what it was like to have limited knowledge of a clock!
- Cycling is boring. This comment was from our 3-year-old. It's a comment I will not be taking seriously. Every morning, we practice ‘social distancing’ during our one daily exercise in place of the usual trip to school. As a result, we even have the authentic morning stress of getting stuff done to a deadline before leaving the house. It may be the worse thing about the day under normal circumstances, but in the current situation, any normality is a comfort for the kids.
How do you make learning about the clock more age-appropriate?
If you could sprinkle magic fairy dust over it [homeschool], what would you do?
- Turn the classroom into hot-dogs and hypnotise the grown-ups
- Make the day go quick because it's my birthday tomorrow
- Turn it into a cute fluffy piggy
- Turn it into a computer game club
What's going well?
Here are the things the kid's thought went well:
- Drawing
- Skateboarding lessons
- Meditation. Yes really!
- Snacktime
- Cycle Sprinting. On empty roads.
- Story Projects. Cut up a magazine and make a story from 2 characters, 2 objects and a location.
- Shorter than usual day. Well, not really because we include an 8am start and finish at 2.30, but they don't see the commute as part of the day.
- Remote ballet lesson. Thanks to their cousin, our youngest found this a highlight, of course!
Now that's the kid's feedback done, I will share some of my own experiences of the week. I hope someone will find this useful. I fully intend to change it up next week based on how things have gone. But there are certain things that I would keep which I think have made a really positive impact on the whole experience. One of the early tips I stumbled across was the idea of involving the kids in coming up with a name for ‘the home school’ and it went down a treat. Not only are the kids very involved in the process but it has a name that can be used when referring to it over dinner etc.. ‘How was school today?’ just doesn't feel correct, does it? Our boy named ours the Learning Cub Club Home School and despite it being a bit of a tongue twister, it has certainly engaged them both. We can call them Cubs, we have paw stickers for rewards we even got on the computer and let them design the logo. When Mummy has finished work she can ask how was ‘Learning Cub Club’ went instead of awkwardly using the term ‘school’.
We have kept the ‘commute’ at the same time as it is essential that they energise before the day. We double it up as a ‘P.E session’, either walking, running, cycling, yoga or whatever. The point is they get to run around and acts a clear boundary between starting a day of learning. A hidden benefit of the current situation is that we can start teaching them about riding safely on the road because it is so quiet where we live.
After we get back, we start the day talking about what is coming up. A surprising finding was that by sitting them down on cushions on the floor we create a similar situation to a classroom. They tend to listen more than normal and even started putting their hands up to speak! Something I did not see coming, but since it has, I'm rolling with it. Whatever makes our lives easier. The plan for the day starts high level (English, Maths, Music etc.) to reduce the stress of lesson planning. I have found that I can normally sketch a couple of ideas over breakfast. If something isn't working, I just stop and move on to something else which is no loss if you plan for bite-size amounts of time for things, say, 30 minutes or so. Storytime, free play and more artistic activities can be moved around without stress depending on the kid's moods as I am still trying to understand if our two have optimum times for creative vs critical thinking.
Snacktime and lunchtime are fixed and a lovely time to get your other half involved in mealtime. We try to finish the day at 2.30 but depends on how the day goes. On one-day we have finished much later as the kids were so engrossed in a remote art lesson put on by a friend. The lack of social interaction for the kids is a concern so we, like many others, have been trying to arrange as many digital hangouts as possible some of which have been much better than others. I was surprised by their apparent lack of engagement in one of them assuming a screen is a magnet, but when you have 12 kids, their siblings and a bunch of background noise it is really no wonder that focus drifted. We’ll persevere, and am sure it is very dependent on all sorts of factors but for us, it seems that something that can be the main focus is important. I tried a word game that involved all kids saying words in succession and can honestly say it wasn't great. For the next session, we need to think of a better way.
Key things to remember
These are the scrappy notes I made to my myself in the last week. Likely these will change as time goes on.
- Keep schedule high level. It allows you to have freedom over the timings at the same time as ensuring you are covering the things you want to cover. It also allows for last-minute changes!
- Use school-supplied materials. They’re brilliant.
- Don’t forget breaks. Seems like an obvious one but the post-lunch slump is something that the kids get as well. I just haven't noticed it before. Get them outside if possible or at least doing star jumps! Attention spans differ greatly between ages, so if you are going to plan things, plan something you can leave the older one doing while you jump in and out of activities with the younger one
- Don’t stress about keeping the work output. It quickly became apparent that the amount of work, paper, painted, crafted and anything else made will quickly fill a room! It's the learning outcome that counts, not the artefacts.
- They loved karaoke and dancing! What better activity combines singing and dancing together at the same time as encouraging them to read!
- Give them stuff that they specifically like. In a class of 25 school kids, our amazing teachers can not possibly tailor the day for each kid. At home, we can do this to a much easier degree. Try kids crossword puzzles, an abundance of colouring-in, use all the toys you have already in the house to help with the learning journey. Whatever it is that you know as a parent will engage them the most
- Praise, reward and recognition really work! The pride on the face of the kids when they are told they’ve made a really smart decision is clear. We have mirrored what they do at school with awarding ‘Paws’ for great decisions that get stuck on a progress chart and use the ‘endowed progress effect’ to get started. This is where they start with a few at the beginning so they can already see progress.
I would love to hear everyone's experience of how it's going at home. We might be in it for the long haul and so would benefit all of us to share the good, the bad and the ugly of emergency homeschooling!
