Home-schooling survival kit

Here’s a home-schooling survival kit to help work-from-home parents stay sane while ensuring your learn-from-home children keep learning and growing!

Introduction

Whether your city or town is facing a second or third wave of the pandemic, one thing is certain. This academic year, many of our kids will continue to be learning from home. From the experience of the past academic year, schools typically schedule for only about 3 hours of lessons each school day. That means parents will be relied on to keep their kids occupied for the rest of the day. This is in addition to having to hold down a full-time job while working from home.

To help parents avoid getting overwhelmed, I have compiled the following home-schooling survival kit from my own experience over the past few months. I hope you will find it useful!

1. Weekly schedule

We start our week with planning on Sunday. My daughter will fill in a schedule for the coming week using the following format.

I asked that she includes not just which subject she plans to work on, but also the details about which topic or page she will be working on. This focuses her mind on what she needs to learn in the coming week. It also avoids her spending time fiddling about what to do during the appointed session.

She also includes daily routines such as meals, cleaning up, breaks, etc. These break up the day into several learning sessions. It shows her where she spends her time. More importantly, it shows her that her day has not just been all work and no play.

My role is to ensure that her plan meets some minimum requirements. For example, she needs to start her day with some physical exercises, schedule for languages and mathematics every day etc. Otherwise, she decides the time slots at which she wants to complete the activities. I review her schedule upon completion, checking for the above requirements and ensuring she does not run wild with electronics screen time.

2. Physical exercise

While I’m not a card-carrying member of the 5 AM Club, I subscribe to the idea that movement is the best thing for your body upon waking up. So this is the first activity I insist my daughter schedule for after cleaning up in the morning. It takes no more than 15-20 minutes. Her usual exercise includes push-up burpees and jumping jacks. I had also bought exercise bands that she can work with.

For a time over the past few months, we had also been following P.E. with Joe, by Joe Wicks from UK. You get Spiderman workout, Batman workout, Froggy workout etc. The last episode for these was screened on 2020 Jul 22nd, sadly. But you can still find all the episodes on YouTube. And I think he’s still putting out videos of workout for adults.

3. Online resources

I would ask my daughter to specify a few time slots each week for her to learn from the following.

1. Khan Academy: Come a long way from its origin. There are now videos for a wide range of subjects across levels from pre-kindergarten to college. You also get test prep on it. You also get to learn from Pixar professionals about how to tell a story.
2. Libby App from Overdrive: if you have a membership at a local library, you might be able to get access to free e-books and audiobooks using this app. I was able to link my daughter’s Kobo e-Reader to Overdrive, so she can borrow books from the public library.
3. Epic: My daughter’s school subscribed to this, so she gets limited access. During the lockdown, I extended the subscription so she can use the app outside school hours as well. There are very few reasons to pay for this subscription when Libby connects you to the public library for free. The two reasons I do are so that (a) my daughter’s teachers can assign her relevant books to read via the Epic app, and (b) she can assess her own progress against that of her classmates.
4. Vocabulary lists: I assign my daughter lists from this site to help her improve her vocabulary and learn new words systematically.

You can also get learning resources from YouTube and newspaper associated sites e.g. New York Times’ Learning Network but you will need to vet and curate these to ensure they are appropriate for your kids. I do this only very occasionally.

4. Offline practice & tools

It is essential for children to put into practice what they had learnt online. Most of the resources cited above do not offer many opportunities for such practices. In contrast, IXL offers a lot of online practices. However, packages can be a bit pricey.

1. That brings us to Teachers pay Teachers. It is a market place for teachers to sell their self-created education resources with other teachers. There are also plenty of free resources that parents can download for kids to practice on.
2. Magnatiles: I find this a great tool to teach shapes and concepts about three-dimensional objects. Instead of imagining what are the differences between a square pyramid and a tetrahedron, my daughter can simply construct these from different pieces of magnatiles.
3. Snap Circuits Junior: The science behind these most likely eludes my daughter. But she had great fun putting the pieces together nonetheless. There is a guidebook that shows 100 different projects you can do. For each project, you try to get a light diode to light up, get a speaker to make some sound, or get a small rotor to propel a fan. The first thing my daughter learnt from this is the Cartesian coordinates. That’s how the intersections on the transparent board are labelled. These help to identify where each piece of a circuit needs to go for the circuit to work.
4. Dash and dot: Dash is a little blue robot that hurls ping-pong balls at you, entertain you with the xylophone or simply roam around the apartment making cute noises. Dot is his stationary companion who can only make cute noises. For them to perform those actions however, my daughter would first need to specify what actions they need to take at each step. This requires her to use block-codes on a mobile phone or iPad to give those instructions. That is her introduction to coding. Older kids get to play with Cue.

5. Play

This is the most essential component in the home-schooling survival kit. My daughter can usually be trusted to exhibit the most initiative when it comes to playing. Given the number of hours she had spent in front of a screen learning and reading, I try to get her to organize her playtime around non-screen toys. We have the usual Lego and Jenga blocks, Uno cards, and classic board games such as Monopoly. Over the past year, we have also acquired additional board games. The reigning favourites are:

1. Catan: We first started to play with this late last year. It instantly overtook Monopoly as the favourite. We introduced the game to my extended family the last time we visited them, and they were all converted too. There is less reliance on luck that comes with the throw of dice. Further, the pace is faster, reducing playtime so we don’t get to the usual mid-game lull as in Monopoly.
2. Catan – Cities and Knights extension: This extension to the basic game makes it a bit more complex. The barbarian ship introduces an additional element of known-unknown that players need to plan for. The new game pieces such as cities, metropolis and knights make the board more colourful and interesting to look at.
3. Ticket to Ride – US: This is a really easy game to learn. It is also the favourite of my daughter’s neighbourhood play date, a girl two years younger than her. It’s also a great way to learn about US geography.
4. Ticket to Ride – European: This introduces a bit more complexity to the US game. You get train stations and tunnels to play with in addition to train cars. You also get to learn about European geography, though the cities names are as of turn 20th century.
5. Pandemic: This is a game of the times. It is also different to the others in that all players need to play as a team. Either all players win together and eradicate the pandemic, or the pandemic spread all over the world and everyone loses.

At the end of the day or during weekends, when weather permits, we would also venture out to my neighbourhood park with the croquet set. We typically wouldn’t get the luxury of setting up the whole game, however. Even then, getting the opportunity to hit the balls past a few hoops is good fun.

If you’re still fretting for things to do these last weeks of summer break, check out these eight activities you can do with your kids!

6. Conclusion

Your own home-schooling survival kit may look very different from the above. You may not rely on the online resources I mentioned, and you may choose to use very different off-line tools. Regardless, I would think that we share the same five key components:

• a schedule;
• physical exercises;
• online resources;
• offline practices and tools; and
• play

If this post gives you some inspiration on developing your very own home-schooling survival kit, please share your comments below, or share the post with your friends!