Geerthana Uthayakumar With schools being closed due to COVID-19, my inbox is full of messages in regards to homeschooling. Today I’m sharing my suggestions via this post.
Firstly, don’t overwhelm yourself by feeling obligated to follow a specific schedule. Definitely don’t allocate something to do per each half hour of the day. I follow general guidelines. For example Math and Languages are done before lunch and right after our morning routine of yoga, meditation, and breakfast. I’ve always found kids do better in Math first thing in the morning while they are still well-rested, relaxed, and not rushed. You may not be great at Math and that’s okay. Teach what you know. Help your kids sharpen up math skills they’ve already learned or need extra help in, respective to age. Counting, one-to-one correspondence, adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, telling time, counting money, measuring length, weight, and capacity, converting between units of measure, fractions, are all fundamentals that your children will be building on top of as the years progress. Make sure they are confident in the fundamentals. When you’ve completed that, make use of a Canadian-curriculum based workbook (Wal-Mart, Costco, Staples, Amazon).
When it comes to literacy, just 10 minutes a day of tracing letters, sentence-writing, journal writing, story-writing, poetry-writing, letter-writing or recipe writing can help kids keep up with writing. This is also a great opportunity to memorize the alphabet, sight words, commonly-used spelling words etc. And of course, 20 minutes of reading a day is essential. For the remainder, I suggest teaching whatever you or your kids are interested in be it dancing, music, culture, history, poetry, art, gardening, the environment, cooking, yoga, meditation, a subject you or they are passionate about with no schedule in mind. Make use of online resources, play board games, go on nature walks, watch documentaries, etc.
Although we all want our kids to keep up with their academics, keep in mind that: 1. There is so much more to learning than just math and language and 2. Some days you will accomplish less than others and that’s okay.
Stay safe everyone!
