SCHOOLING AT HOME
March break is over but classrooms remain shuttered and teachers and parents face educating children in their homes for the foreseeable future.
With Ontario schools closed until at least April 5, and students being encouraged to continue learning at home, many parents are likely wondering, ‘How do I do this?’
Ottawa mom Darlene McLeod has been home-schooling her two daughters, aged 8 and 11, for years. In an interview, she shared some of her own lessons learned.
Q What’s the first thing you would tell parents looking at (at least) two weeks of supporting their kids’ home-based learning and maybe freaking out a little bit because they’ve never done anything like this?
A To not worry about skills. I think the most important thing that we can teach our kids — other than just being good people — is to enjoy learning, just to enjoy knowledge acquisition.
If your kids don’t learn how to do long division this week, or this year, they can learn to do that in the future. Whatever they’re missing out on in class right now, if we can just encourage them to still be interested in the world, and to feel that they can educate themselves, that they can seek knowledge and acquire it themselves … that’s incredibly valuable. Because kids who love learning become adults who love learning, and then there’s nothing really standing in their way.
Q How do you go about helping your kids maintain focus outside of a structured classroom setting?
A Learning can happen in any room of the house, it can happen in any chair, it can happen at a table, it can happen on a couch. That’s true for all home-schooling, but I think especially right now because these circumstances are so extraordinary ... it’s stressful for the kids.
When they are having trouble concentrating, I let them take a break, make sure that they eat, getting them moving sometimes can be helpful. Giving them choices can work — “If you don’t want to do math right now, would you like to read book about the Middle Ages, and then tell me about it, and then we can do the math later?’
I’ve also learned to a certain extent not to push things too much. I do make sure that they do their work, but on a day when it’s really not working, rather than hammering away at it, sort of in futility, we find something else to do that is going to work, and we come back to it the next day.
Q Do you find there are ideal hours — when to start, when to wrap things up — when your kids are learning best?
A I do find that they tend to get sloppier with their work as the day drags on. If I still want them to try and push through for a little bit longer, I’ll have them do something a little more creative later in the day — write me a comic book that retells this little bit of history that we studied today, or let’s draw a cell and colour it in.
Sometimes lists help — here are the things you need to get done this week. That kind of gives them a goal — I can choose how much free time I get based on how fast I work. That has at times really helped, giving them that decision-making power.
Q How do you balance online learning with other off-line learning activities?
A We tend to do most of our history learning from books, and then I supplement it with stuff online.
I tend to use the online stuff — I don’t want to say bribes — but it’s sort of a treat almost. “Get some of the math done in your workbook, and then you can do Prodigy,” which is an online math game. Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.