Navigating the home-schooling challenge
01/17/2021
Across the United Kingdom right now many families are facing the struggles of adapting to new COVID-19 restrictions; including home schooling.
Education providers are having to adapt to the ever-changing situation and must provide three hours of learning per day. David Jones, Education Sales Manager tells us “We are incredibly proud of all of the work that schools are doing to try and assist you through the home-schooling challenge, whilst still remaining open for key worker’s children and for everyone who is staying home and adapting to home-schooling to support the NHS. We hope that we can continue to support our Education customers through the challenges of this lockdown and beyond.”
Here we provide a few ways to help families with children being home-schooled during lockdown.
Create a routine
Creating some structure around the home-schooling day will help children to know what to expect and break up the day to add some normality to an already unusual situation. Remember that even at school each day, each lesson is broken down into manageable chunks. This also allows for adults to work out how to juggle their own responsibilities.
Don’t add too much pressure
There are more than 11 million children who are normally in schools across the UK, every single one of those children and their families are having to adapt to a new version of home schooling. That is a lot of change for everyone and adults should try not to put too much pressure on themselves to become teachers, but also on children to adapt straight away. There are lots of invaluable things that children learn and get from their families including support, love and social interaction.
Follow interests
As well as schoolwork children should be encouraged to do things they enjoy – play is very important. In the same way that adults are more engaged with things they enjoy, so are children. If they want to do a project about rockets or animals they will still be learning and using important skills, letting younger children learn in their own way for some of the day can help keep them interested.
Talk it through
Schools and teachers will be doing as much as possible to support you remotely through this period of home-schooling and they also have the student’s best interest at heart, do speak to them if you’re having problems. It’s also really important to stay connected during lockdown for both children and adults. Make the most of technology to stay connected with friends, family and others in the same situation.
Helpful resources
As well as the great work and resources schools are pulling together to support families through this lockdown there are lots of resources being made available publicly:
- Lockdown learning from the BBC – Across TV, iPlayer and online the BBC is putting on educational lessons and content for all primary and secondary school pupils.
- PE with Joe – Joe Wicks is returning three days a week with his PE lessons for the nation.
- Free online resources – ParentKind and Oak National Academy have lists of free online resources for everyone to use
- Free broadband – Read more here on the ‘Get Help with Tech’ scheme and how people can access free broadband to help with home-schooling. BT and EE have also made BBC Bitesize free to their mobile users so that it doesn’t eat into data allowances.
