I want to share how we handled online-school during Covid-19. Never in a million years did we think we were going to have to teach at home. My kids were in school and about to go to spring break vacation which for us is one week off school. Thrilled to have a break, never expecting to have to stay home and quarantine. The concern started after the news of a possible school closure were shared, and we might need to stay home. The school district extended spring break for one more week and an extra week after that, and then classes moved online.
It was a bit shocking realizing that we didn’t know exactly how online-school will work. Thankfully our district provided the tools needed for all the kids to make the transition. In our home, with two kids, the youngest was ok with the transition but the teenager was not happy. Socializing at this age is important. Thankfully we have technology that help them stay in touch. The plan was set to do homeschool as organized and stress free as we could. The scheduled I made matched the hours of their regular schedules for both schools. My hope was that if they go back to in person school the kids would not struggle.
Considering the circumstances, the kids were happy with their schedule, and had time to relax – something they didn’t have at school. I learned that teaching all subjects to both kids was doable with the help from videos and asking teachers when necessary. It was challenging at times, when the kids got more work without any face to face with teachers for online learning. For my oldest the hard part was the lack of interaction. She missed choir the most. We had ups and downs with assignments, technology and sometimes we all had melt downs, but we managed.
Overall we did our best to stay on track, the online-school work was turned in on time, sometimes earlier. I am thankful that I was prepared to help with the school work, due to my volunteering in school, which help me to have a better understanding on how the teachers work to teach the kids. Fortunately for us I enjoy teaching. Of course, I did loose my mind sometimes, because the kids thought they could get away with certain things such more freely at times. I managed to be firm with the schedule and explaining that we needed it to stick to it for their own benefit.
Now, teaching at home it’s not for everyone. I heard a lot of parents saying that it is too much work and struggled to find structure with their kids. It is a fact that having different lifestyles affects on how we manage online-school. What worked for us might not work for you, but I hope it can give some ideas on how to teach at home since we are still dealing with covid-19. For the new school year, our school district offered us two-options: online-school or send them to regular school. We opted for staying home as we felt more comfortable with that for our family. Two days after making our choice we received a call from district to inform us that school will be online for all until future notice on September.
The good news is that the new online schooling will actually have teachers help with video calls and it’s not just the parents feeling alone teaching. The best news is that gifted, specials and arts are back as well. It’s good that the school will provide all of that, even though we are keeping kids away from socializing which is concerning as I do not know how it will affect them in the future. In any case, here’s how we managed during the covid-19 lockdown.
- We created a schedule for each kid matching their normal school hours for the most part. A key difference is that I added breaks of 15 minutes and I gave them 1 full hour of lunch time.
- I made them look at the schedule and made them both responsible for knowing what times they need to do what type of work for the week and when they had breaks. They did this by setting alarms on their phone and they will check their schedule to know what they needed to do at that time until it became a routine.
- I made them read lots, they fought me because they didn’t have reading assignments on their online work as much as they should have. I am a believer tat reading it’s the best from of relaxing and getting knowledge at the same time.
- School offered us the chrome books to make learning easier and we used them to do everything in them for school, we did return them once school ended.
- The last one was to make it fun and try to find different ways to make the home-learning and easier transition for them.
Thank you for reading!