Home-schooling has now become the new normal, but coming up with new ways to keep your children engaged in their makeshift classrooms can be tricky. After all, few us ever expected to become teachers overnight, and so 11 weeks into home-schooling, it’s only natural if we’re deviating slightly from those carefully-planned timetables.
To give parents a helping hand, we’ve put together a few tips that are designed to help you maintain the learning from home momentum and keep things ticking along in the home classroom.
Designing a lesson plan together
As simple as it may seem, a great way to keep children involved is to let your them contribute to lesson plans. Naturally, this doesn’t mean dropping lessons in fractions or the Tudors altogether, but jointly identifying learning objectives can be a great way to kick start the week and keep children on track. It will also help you get a sense of where your child’s passion lies, and if you are nurturing the next Isaac Newton or Mary Beard!
Combining interests
Just as flexible working is the new norm in the business world, children too will benefit from getting away from their desks from time-to-time. Why not incorporate some interactive activities into the home curriculum? After all, children do learn best by doing. Baking up some goodies to teach them about raising agents, asking them to answer a maths question by doing that number of star jumps or trying one of these awesome home science experiments are all great ways of capturing your kids attention and can transform seemingly dull timetabled lessons into fun, educational activities.
Venturing into the great outdoors
With summer officially upon us, garden is the perfect location for an outdoor science lesson. A ready-made scientific laboratory, an hour or so spent outdoors learning about garden-dwelling creepy crawlies, weather patterns or seed germination is a sure-fire way of encouraging your kids to engage with the great outdoors and getting their scientific minds whirring.
Parent-teacher role reversal
For lots of us, it will be a long time since we learned how to order a baguette in French. Interestingly, however, it is being reported you retain 80% of what you teach, so why not reverse the roles? Get your children to give you a flash lesson in French, or a quick science lesson. Why not suggest they devise their own lesson plan and exam to put their parent’s knowledge to the test? If traditional teaching methods have lost their shine, some parent-teacher role reversal can help switch things up and ensure key Maths and English skills don’t get missed off the weekly home lesson plan.
How have you been keeping structure whilst home-schooling? Please do get in touch with any handy tricks that have worked a treat for your household – we’d love to hear from you!