KG kids homebound in first year of schooling, parents worried
It’s a gap year the parents hadn’t foreseen. Children set to enter kindergarten in 2020-21 are likely to lose a crucial year, the most crucial in the first decade of schooling.
This is the stage at which three- and four-year-olds typically learn to socialise with a large group of peers, spend hours away from home, write the alphabet, learn the numbers, sing rhymes in groups, play, fight and make up, share toys and snacks.
Classes are out of the question amid the Covid-19 pandemic, and for this age group, remote learning is not as effective — their attention spans are short, the material calls for repetitive actions under direct supervision (how do you teach a child to write through a computer screen?).
So, instead of structured play and supervised study, your tots may be spending the year watching educational videos on laptops, either alone or with a parent. In states like
Maharashtra, where online classes have been discontinued for levels below Class 2, some schools are offering edutainment sessions via Facebook Live, where adults tell the kids that A is for Apple and it’s bad to tell a lie.
“I encourage my child to attend because at least it’s something,” says the parent of a four-year-old who was supposed to start KG at Mumbai’s Villa Theresa School this month. “But they’re reciting the same nursery rhymes my daughter moved on from while in nursery, and that worries me. For her, A is now for Astronaut.”
Given the short attention spans and high degrees of restlessness, the videos and online lessons are also becoming hard for the children to focus on, and differentiate one from another.
“Initially, Advita adjusted and responded well. Her school did two 45-minute sessions with a 30-minute break in between. Activities ranged from colouring to storytelling sessions to learning the alphabet and numbers, with a little general knowledge and puzzle-solving thrown in. But after a while, not being able to go out and play made her irritable and restless,” says Manasvi Sareen, a software engineer from Delhi whose daughter is four.
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