Homeschooling During COVID-19
I home-schooled my kids for many years. Zach was home-schooled from 1st grade until 8th and Issy from Kinder to 4th. We loved homeschooling, but the kids wanted to attend school and participate in sports. It was a heartbreaking decision to send them back to school. Now with the current situation I get to home-school them once again. I am so excited. I am sharing what we are doing on my Facebook page, however, not everyone has access to my personal page. For those people I am writing this blog.
As a new temporary homeschooler, you may be out purchasing workbooks and worrying about how you will manage 6 hours of schooling while working and managing a household. Well you should NOT school for 6 hours. That is a time schedule set for schools with large amounts of children. Most of the time spent at school is classroom management. For majority of homeschooler we get our lessons complete in 2 to 3 hours. Yes, you read that correctly. You only need 2-3 hours, even that in my opinion is a lot. When your child can get one on one instruction that is geared to their specific learning style and level of learning, they pick up the information quickly.
You do NOT have to teach what the schools are teaching. This is a time where most schools are not operating, and they will figure out how and when to teach the kids all the information they have missed. In honesty, it will not be much. Schools are slower than homeschoolers when teaching subjects or topics. Work on subjects and concepts where your child struggles. Are they having issues in math, reading, or writing? If they are help them get caught up or strengthen their knowledge of the subject. The one thing I did with my kids is I did not rush them. We stayed on a topic until they mastered it. When I say master the concept, I am NOT talking about rote memorization I am talking about understanding the why behind a problem. Example: why do we carry the one in addition? What does it mean to multiply? If you want to see how we taught math concepts see our videos on YouTube and our lesson plans. When you watch my kid’s, math videos you will see that they truly understand math concepts. This has made them strong in math and they find it easy. You need to have a strong base to learn higher level math.
*Note: I do not have writing lessons, because that is not my strength. I outsourced that part of our learning
Make learning fun. Do not treat this like school, kids do not have to sit at a desk and work on worksheets. Do fun science projects, watch short fun educational videos, learn about geography by tossing around a inflated globe and playing music (see our video) or learn the history of your family with math thrown in for fun (see video).
Enjoy this time with your kids and show them how to love learning. You can use our plans and watch our videos. There are additional resources available here. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram to see what we are up to.
