A helping hand with your homeschooling

Former primary school teachers offer ‘parent-friendly’ learning pack support for frazzled families

The bubble burst for many of us with latest lockdown announcements when any glimmer of hope for a seamless return to school was promptly extinguished.

While many parents enjoy teaching their children at home, for others the prospect of having to dust off their teaching skills again fills them with dread.

Like much about this pandemic, the initial onslaught may have been characterised by uncertainty. What programme of work should they follow?

Should the children guide the learning or should it be imposed, with the parent in the role of a conventional teacher?

How do you keep kids engaged in learning? And what should you do when his concentration fades?

A group of former primary school teachers have come to the rescue with Learn at Home Packs.

Each one contains eight lessons with teacherled teaching input videos, parent-friendly friendly lesson plans, slideshow presentations and printable worksheets.

Oli Ryan of educational resource gurus PlanBee said: ‘We hope these packs will take some of the pressure off parents who are new to homeschooling.

“They’re designed specifically for mums and dads, so there’s no educational jargon.

“Educating your children at home can seem a pretty daunting prospect, but with these packs, we think we’re helping with the heavy lifting.”

The packs cover interesting and unusual topics such as forensic science, Italian culture, women’s suffrage and even include simple easy-to-follow cookery lessons.

“We wanted to make sure that the lesson packs were educational, but interesting and fun too,” continued Oli. “We’ve made sure they cover topics that children are unlikely to have learnt about in school previously – hopefully it’ll all be new to them!” PlanBee has put a free lesson video online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXlbeU2e_ x4&feature=youtu.be so you can get a taste of what’s included with lots of teaching resources available.