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. 


Hosted By :
Prisha Lalwani Mummasaurus.com
IG: @mummasauruss
FB: /mummasaurus1


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16 thoughts on “Our Home Learning Journey”

    1. Thank you for stopping by Arti. Podcasts are a great learning resource as well as an entertainment medium. We love them!

      1. What a lovely article, all aspects taken up in a chronological order. You are taking lot of pains to school your child, kudos to you

  1. We also do most of the things that you have mentioned but my kids enjoy free play a lot and since i have 2 kids, they are a great company for one another where they play together with either cars, blocks or dolls together for hours at stretch.

    1. Quite honest and upfront. Parenting during the pandemic has been tough for all of us. I Also had to start homeschooling my toddlers because the gap in their education when was actually supposed to start, was literally drowning me in mom guilt😂😂😂😂

  2. Wow, this is a wonderful post on home learning. We do all these activities at home too and I must say if kids are channelized well, they do excel in learning.

  3. Hi Neha, it’s my first visit to your blog. I don’t know the age of your son but for my 4 year old, what has worked these past 6-7 months has been the structure to his day, that we enforce. He dislikes his online lessons too but he knows that is a part of the day he has to get through in order to get to the fun free play stuff. We’ve not had to turn to any apps or outside classes throughout this period because he’s happy having school time in the morning and free time later on. I’m aware every child is different and has different needs, but I’m just sharing my own experience as a mum!

  4. So valid points and I could relate to the initial days when my son wanted to share and was getting adjusted to the online learning concept and was a bit nervous to speak… He is doing better but still misses his classroom and school.. another wuesyat the top of mind is are we yet ready and daring to send our kids back to school without a vaccination available? Hoping to find answers…

    1. I guess it also depends on the age of the child. For 3-7yr olds, online “classes” are harder to adjust to. Especially since we all used to be focused on reducing screen-time in pre-covid days. Now suddenly expecting a child of that age to sit still and focus on a screen is not fair to them. Hope the schools can start soon enough!

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