How to Prevent Covid-19 Halting your Child’s Education: Tips & Resources

 

With many schools currently closed due to COVID-19 and the likelihood of many more being required to do so in the coming weeks, this post is designed to offer some hints and suggestions for things you may wish to do if your child is required to stay at home.

As it stands, most schools are putting measures in place to support pupils during mandatory closures; however, there are many parents opting to keep their children at home because they/a family member is in an at-risk category, and for whom such resources may not be readily available. If this applies to you, this post may be helpful. As older children will be more independent in their learning, this post focuses on the primary sector.

If planning to home-school for a few weeks, it is useful to email your child’s teacher(s) to ask for some guidelines as to the topics and content they would like you to cover. This provides the best opportunity for continuity for your child and most teachers will readily supply such information. Many schools will already have made this available in the form of overview planning documents on the school website, so it is helpful to check what is on there. National curriculum documents are a good reference point for parents keen to ascertain what objectives their child should be reaching across various subjects.

Do not worry if you are unable to access as much information as you would ideally like. We are living through an unknown scenario and there is much you can do to support your child regardless. Aim for action over inaction and good over perfect standards. Even a brief conversation with your child will reveal much of what they have been learning about (upon which you can build) and will enable you to ascertain topics of interest to them which you can explore together.

Armed with content ideas, the next important step is to create a timetable. You may find it helpful to list your child’s subjects, the content ideas for each and then schedule your days accordingly. Bear in mind, “core subjects” should be taught on a daily basis. Think about how you integrate and link others together to make efficient use of time and build on background knowledge. 1:1 work is more intense than that which takes place in a classroom so sessions need not be the same length as would be done at school. Moreover, regular breaks, in which your child engages in some physical activity, are important. You may wish to use Go Noodle for inspiration and ideas!

There are a wealth of online resources available to support parents. Some really helpful sites include for mathematics and English include:

 

English

The Literacy Shed: this provides video stimuli to serve as writing prompts.

Breaking News English: access levelled newspaper articles and accompanying activity ideas. The articles provide useful topics for discussion and oral language development.

Read Write Think: lots of classroom resources (which may be sorted by grade level), interactive games and prompts and calendar-inspired activities.

Quill: aimed at improving writing skills, this website is suitable for older learners. To begin, it is useful to undertake the diagnostic assessment provided. Thereafter, users can work through lessons aimed at specific target areas, sentence-joining activities, grammar and proof-reading tasks.

Vocabulary.com: develop vocabulary with this responsive site. Students can enter word-lists of their own to study.

Project Gutenburg: access free e-books on this site.

Kiz Club: free access to simple levelled readers, songs and rhymes, phonics activities, crafts and more. Lots of printables for you to download.

 

Mathematics

Figure This: some great maths challenges to develop mental calculations, thinking skills, and mathematical reasoning.

Transum: love this site for a variety of starters of the day to get the brain focused on and thinking about maths and problem-solving. You can search by category for tasks relevant to your lesson or use this option to find appropriate retrieval tasks, supporting your child to recall material that has been previously taught.

Corbett Maths: provides videos, worksheets, quizzes and useful 5-a-day levelled calculation questions.

Illuminations by NCTM: this site has lots of lesson ideas, interactives and some fantastic brain teasers.

Greg Tang Math: features games and resources. I particularly like the word puzzle generator.

 

Times Tables

Have your child practise their tables on

The School Hub I prefer to use this site with the sound off!

Times Tables

Maths is Fun

Collins Times Tables Test Simulator

Complete Maths

 

The following sites enable pupils to study English, maths and a variety of other subject areas.

Khan Academy: a wealth of free resources across a range of subject and age ranges.

Free Rice: There are a variety of games in various subject areas available on Freerice. As questions are answered correctly, advertisements appear on your screen, triggering a financial payment to the World Food Programme when these are seen. No inappropriate advertising content should be shown.

 

Second Language Learners

Lingo Hut: an excellent site for vocabulary development with lots of games and supporting activities available.

Duolingo: available as an app and a website, this is the world’s most popular additional language learning tool, offering a variety of languages to learn and site languages to select from.

 

Blended Learning

I recommend a mix of learning activities rather than having your child using screen-based learning tools all day. A few other brief tips and reminders:

• Use this time together to share lots of books, discussing the characters, themes, new words encountered, assessing comprehension, and drawing parallels with other familiar books.
• When teaching mathematics, remember CPA (concrete – pictorial – abstract). It is vital children have access to a range of concrete manipulatives when first introduced to a new concept. They move from this to representing equations pictorially. Finally, as they get older, the need for manipulatives decreases as they are able to think in more abstract terms.
• Young children should be encouraged to play. Chat to them as they do so, using the opportunity to introduce new vocabulary and sentence structures.
• Board games and card games provide lots of opportunities for language and social skills development.
• Include time for arts and crafts. 
• Don’t forget to check out our shop for a selection of resources (especially Word for Word for phonics development and our CardEd series for language, mathematical and thinking skills). There are several free downloads available for you to try. 

• As a reminder, as well as guiding you in the teaching of foundation skills for phonics and introducing decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling), Word for Word Book 1 (Stages 1 – 4) contains a plethora of activities to promote the development of fine motor skills that you may find extremely useful. Detailed tracking documents are also provided to enable you to plan and monitor your child’s progress.
• You may find our blog useful for teaching hints and ideas, e.g. identifying initial sounds and ending sounds using Word for Word or numeral identification and ordering, one-to-one correspondence, sequencing numbers and developing vocabulary using CardEd.

 

I will add further posts to this blog in the coming days with other useful resource recommendations (particularly for non-core subjects) for parents home-schooling their children at this time.

 

Wishing you all well. Stay safe, healthy and learning lots!

 

 

Images courtesy of Pixabay