Home Schooling - tips and experiences

[Deleted member 1147]

One thing to take into account is that, at school, kids actually do very little work.
If they have say 5 one hour lessons per day on an average school day. How much work do they actually do per hour? 10-15 mins intro, dressing down the naughty ones etc, homework at the end of the lesson.
As such don’t expect the kids to work for the full 9 to 4 or whatever the school day is.
they should have breaks every hour, and an hour for lunch.
In other words, don’t push them to work all day.

 

[HowlingGale]

I went straight in at the deep end a couple of weeks ago. Had leave booked to paint the kitchen, then the schools closed. 5+7 yr old running around meant no painting.

Started on the Monday with a timetable. Words, Numbers for an hour in the morning then a very flexible day of documentaries, PE, reading, drawing, baking, breaks etc. It was hard work then the wife had to take over as my work trumps her work as I'm a key worker. T

The kids seemed invested in the timetable as long as they got TV at some point.

The problem with my two is they need run like dogs to tirethem out otherwise they're a bit of a nightmare. So PE was a 2 mile run ?.

 

[harpo_72]

We have ignored Easter holiday, we are still working. The theory being if we get out of it we will never get it back together.
This morning I did interesting facts about spider man ( he is 7 and obsessed!) so we did reading and writing. He then had a bounce around on the trampoline to get some of the energy out. Now he is playing sonic the hedgehog ( that is a pile of pooh ?). He was supposed to be helping Mummy make a chocolate Easter egg but I think he was just a bit bored!
His maths have improved and he counted quite a few bounces on the trampoline without out skipping a few numbers.
I can see school is a bit tedious for boys they have so much other stuff in their heads !!

 

[Fromtherough]

We ‘broke up’ on Thursday. My seven year old refused to do Joe Wicks’ PE on Friday as she was off! She’s so funny. Homeschooling has been good up to now. Her teacher provides a steady stream of work via Google Classrooms each day. We mix it up with some fun creative stuff. With both of us working from home my wife and I take turns at being teacher, around our work obligations. I like to think I’m the more fun teacher...

It’s not only school she’s missing, it’s all of her usual activities; dancing, swimming, gymnastics and brownies. So we include plenty of exercise to keep it fun and also tire her out. Her dancing has weekly online classes so she can have a bit of normality and speak to her friends. She also has a few video chats with her friends from school a couple of times a week, which we think is important. As an only child, she’s only physically seeing me and her Mam.

Going to have an actual break for ten days from school work, as we’re now off work too. We did consider cancelling our planned Easter leave, but decided against it as although we can’t go on any of our planned trips/activities, we can still spend time off together. Yesterday was spent playing games in the garden, making slime and relaxing in the sun. I think we all need some R&R to recharge our batteries. Just hope the good weather continues as it helps with not feeling cooped up.

 

[ScienceBoy]

Doing about two or three worksheets a day from twinkl, his attention span at 4 is about 7 minutes so we do that every couple of hours.

The rest is playing a few of his educational games, getting outside, watching educational shows like alphablocks and numberblocks and steering him towards educational games on his amazon fire kids tablet.

So in a 6 hour school day we probably do about 60 minutes direct education a day at the very most with him. The rest is him by himself doing stuff.

We are not taking an Easter break with him but instead carrying on worksheets through the weekend, normally we have not done weekends but he has some Easter themed worksheets so we are going to use those. As that probably equates to about 15 minutes a day I think that’s fine.

Children learn all day no matter the hour, the one key ingredient is your and their imagination, together you can find learning in any activity at any time!