Our Home Learning Journey

With school being physically shut since March, I’ve been fretting and fuming in bursts about what kind of learning my son is experiencing while being home confined with two adults who are more-or-less living in front of either screens or the kitchen sink. Our son’s school, which I loved during normal times, really botched-up their whole distance learning game. There wasn’t too much coming from that end, so of course, we as parents started to wonder what kind of structured learning we should try to do.

I’m not under any delusion of “home-schooling” my child. I’m not a trained educator, and I don’t intend to be the sole one responsible for his learning journey for the long run. There’s a proper curriculum and process that needs to be managed by parents who are actually homeschooling their kids. We are not.

This is merely a period of temporary absence of school.

For us, it is enough to know that he has been actively engaged and learning basic literacy, math etc. in an age-appropriate manner. Each child, each parent and each household needs to figure out what works for them of course, but here are a few of the things we have tried, liked/dismissed, considered, loved & hated during the past five months.

Workbooks & worksheets:

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of online resources available on age-appropriate worksheets for children. These are online libraries that have been painstakingly put together by wonderful educators (bless their souls!) to make sure kids can do what their peers are supposed to be doing. The problem is quite honestly a problem of plenty, and a quick google search for “worksheets for a (xx) year old” will lead you to more results than you can browse through. For us, curators like Story House Mumbai have been life-savers, as have some of the workbooks we managed to order from Amazon.

I’m also of the school of thought that worksheets can not be the only mode of teaching. Some children take to this form of learning better than others. Our son, for instance, ends up doing not more than 3-4 worksheets at a time. An interesting after-effect though of introducing him to worksheets has been that he likes to create his own little activity sheets. Seeing him put his logical reasoning to use and create his own versions of match-the-followings or odd-one-out and mazes is quite satisfying. And that’s all I nudge him towards.

Apps:

Let me be upfront, we are not a no-screen household, but we do subscribe to the philosophy that active screen time is any day preferred over passive. So we restrict usage to 30-40minutes on the iPad, not every day, and under peripheral supervision. Yes, I’ve struggled with a phase of “he-wont-eat-without-screen” a few years ago, and it took us an awful amount of time to break that cycle. So we’re quite cautious about falling into that trap again.

But of course, the time spent on the iPad has increased during the lock-down. My only solace is that we managed to use it as a tool of learning. Some of the apps that I’ve liked include Junior Chef (free basic version), Dino Puzzles (free), Khan Academy Kids (free), Moose Math (free) & Reading Eggs (subscription, with a 1-month free trial). They have actually made a difference in his reading & math and all the learning is incorporated in a fun non-obvious way.

Online Classes:

Sometime in the first week of April, we got our son excited to be attending “online school” where he would meet his teachers on a video call, “just like Mumma & Dadda have been doing online office.”

That lasted for about 10 seconds.

He dislikes online learning with a vengeance. Apart from the limited interaction he had with his school teachers, we tried astronomy classes, lego building, phonic lessons, French lessons, Mandarin lessons, yoga (with a known instructor from whom he used to learn earlier as well). But these were all rejected after 1 or 2 sessions. He refused to participate in any “class” with a constant complaint of “i-want-a-real-class-not-zoom-class”.

(check out “how to turn off an already reluctant child” for a humorous take on online learning in our home!)

So, I’ve given up trying to register him for more such classes. The only “classes” he does now are once-a-week online coding with Whitehat Jr and once-in-a-while drawing video lessons with the author-illustrator Rob Biddulph. (Yes, I know the latter is hardly a “class”, but the drawing skills have definitely exponentially improved with these videos).

Podcasts & TV:

Like I mentioned before, we aren’t big fans of passive screen time. So there isn’t much edutainment that we consume on Youtube or Netflix etc. We purely use television for entertainment purposes. He has his shows (ranging from superheroes to transformers to royal detectives), which are always censored by us, and he gets to watch these to unwind (5-7 hours a week is what we’ve stuck to)

Another entertainment medium, which also helps with learning, are podcasts. We discovered many of these during the lockdown, and they play all day as background sound for him. This is again a problem of plenty, and not always quality. So we have heard and rejected quite a few. The tried and tested podcasts I would recommend are: Stories Podcast, StoryNory, & Fun Fables (for language, vocabulary & general entertainment); Reading Bug Adventures, Science Adventures for Kids, & Kids Story Room (for exposure to science facts, creativity & language).

(Don’t forget to read my detailed reviews on Podcasts that we love, by clicking here)

Unstructured Play:

Keeping the best for the last, because it is just so vast.

There have been days spent exploring the infinite pieces of Lego and coming up with what he calls “my creations.” We have gone through 2 reams full of paper with drawings of forests and cities that form the backdrop of his stories and games (all done by him). There have been cards made for all of his friends, grandparents, cousins, and anyone else he has missed on a particular day. We have done read-aloud of every book in his over-flowing home library, and read them again and again and again and again… There have been puzzles solved and re-solved, old forgotten toys pulled off from the shelves, forts made out of bedsheets, obstacle courses made out of the furniture, and a zillion other games created played and forgotten.

All this has been interspersed of course with hugs & cuddles, and tantrums & meltdowns.

In addition to being a different learning experience for our son, the lockdown has certainly been a phase for us to unlearn a lot. When it comes to educating a primary schooler we have learnt to go with the flow. It is enough that he’s learning bits and pieces of reading and math because he’s also learning to use his imagination and creativity, he’s also learning to communicate and feel. And perhaps most importantly he’s learning what it’s like to spend the maximum possible time with the two people he cares about most in the whole world.

This post is part of a blog hop hosted by Prisha Lalwani of Mummasaurus.com – Let’s Blog with Pri Season 2.

Do hop on to the train and read what my fellow bloggers Hansa (Mumma Talks) and Amritha (The Mumma Startup) are writing about. 

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Prisha Lalwani Mummasaurus.com
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