Supporting your child’s home-schooling during Covid-19

With the recent Coronavirus developments and the new lockdown, families around the UK are trying to find a good daily rhythm while home-schooling their children.  How do you help your child to keep abreast of their education?

Prioritise

If you are not a teacher, it may be hard to plan and organise your child’s classes and help studying when home-schooling. Prioritise the core subjects – Mathematics and English. There are a lot of free resources online to support you and your child, in addition to your child’s school’s resources.  For other subjects, you can be creative- letting your child watch documentaries or videos to cover them. A great way to help is to ask your child to teach you what they’ve learned after a lesson. Remember that it may take a couple of weeks to get used to this new normal.

Routines and Boundaries

The change in school routine may have caused your child to lose their footing. You can set up a new routine together to help motivate your son or daughter with home-schooling. Scheduling break times is vital. They could be the same as they were in class to keep the link between school and home.  Moreover, keeping school break times can be beneficial as your child will not be too disoriented when school starts again. Find a quiet. dedicated study space for your child. If possible, make this outside of their room. This way, they can associate the study space with learning and find it easier to concentrate. Moreover, their bedroom can be reserved for relaxation and sleep.   Discourage the use of mobile phones and make ensure that they respect the times you set.

Loneliness in home-schooling

Loneliness is one of the biggest risk factor of lockdown. Lack of contact with friends can affect the mental health and wellbeing of your child. Peer interaction and group support is an important part of children’s development. You can organise the day by starting with school and following this with some time to socialise as a family. You can also coordinate your “home-schooling” time with other parents and organise a virtual playtime for the children after studying in order to minimise feelings of loneliness.  

Anxiety

Children may feel anxious about the interruption of their school routine. They will miss not being able to go outside and meet friends as they please. Uncertainties about the future, due to Covid-19, will impact your child’s mental health and wellbeing. On top of this, they also have academic pressure and many struggle the new home schooling routine. The pandemic has put a lot of pressure on our kids. But keeping in contact with friends and regular physical exercise can help reduce the anxiety. For more grounding and calming activities, practising yoga or meditation with your child can have immense benefits.  

Help & Support for home-schooling

During this second lockdown, schools are lot more prepared for online learning. If you are concerned about your child’s progress, your first port of call should be their school. Five or more hours online lessons per day is a lot of screen-time, especially for younger children. If you feel that this is too much for your child, please speak to the school and ask whether they can scale down the number of online lessons in core subjects and put in place some relaxation classes instead. Talk to your fellow parents. Most parents are in the same boat, many juggling working from home whilst supervising their children’s learning. It can be huge comfort to share your concerns with another family.  

With vaccines being rolled out more quickly, there is light at the end of the tunnel. We hope that children will be back in school before too long.