Quango’s helpful tip for home-schooling? Make some fake POO!

As kitchen-table lessons start tomorrow, Education Scotland offers parents some distinctly whiffy advice

MANY parents are already worrying about how they will cope with the pressures of home schooling their children.

Now a massive list of dos and don’ts has been drawn up to help mums and dads provide an education during the current lockdown.

The official new guidance reassures parents that they are ‘not expected to be teachers’.

However, it also contains a bewildering – and occasionally bizarre – set of suggestions on how to deliver classes on everything from maths and physics to PE and sex education.

Tips include offering stickers to younger children as a reward for completing work and breaking up lessons with a ten-minute family dance.

Wacky suggestions include making paper aeroplanes and ‘fake poo’ to help with science, and converting the living room into an obstacle course to stage a mock Olympics for PE.

Optimistically, the guidance also suggests getting children to help do housework as a way of improving skills in maths.

Under current lockdown restrictions, schools will offer only remote learning

‘Hub encourages parents to think outside the box’

to the majority of pupils for at least the next month, meaning tens of thousands of primary and secondary pupils across the country are required to learn from home.

With the new term beginning tomorrow, schools will provide some resources, but families are also being encouraged to ‘support their child’s education’ – often while working from home.

Government agency Education Scotland has published hundreds of pages of home lesson ideas on its online Parentzone portal which it suggests will help parents ‘be at the heart of your child’s learning during Covid-19’.

The resources include documents that put the focus on supporting numeracy, literacy, religious and moral education, STEM (science, technologies, engineering and maths) subjects, cookery skills, Gaelic learning and sexual health.

To assist with STEM subjects inside the house, parents are encouraged to make paper aeroplanes to ‘work out how things fly’ and to use a torch to ‘investigate shadows’.

For an RE or history lesson, the guidance suggests taking a walk and pointing out buildings and objects and what practices they relate to – and encouraging children to ‘develop their own thinking about other practices and traditions’.

To keep active, parents with gardens are encouraged to hold an ‘Olympic Games’ competition, featuring different events such as long jump and sprinting. For those who do not have their own outdoor space, the guidance suggests setting up a living room ‘assault course’ using pillows and furniture.

The Scottish Government’s Parent Club Scotland website, heavily promoted on Facebook, also has a dedicated Learning at Home hub – which encourages parents ‘to think outside the box’. Play ideas include making puppets from household items and holding a puppet show or encouraging older children to roleplay as the headteacher and to teach their younger siblings. Getting children involved in household chores, such as a spring clean, or offering them the chance to help cook dinner, measuring ingredients to help with maths skills, is also suggested.

For parents of teens, the Parent

Club Scotland website reminds parents ‘there is more to school than work’ and that young people will be missing socialising with their peers in the playground.

However the new guidelines also advise mums and dads not to worry too much. They stress parents are ‘not expected to be teachers’ and that keeping children ‘safe, happy and healthy are the most important things parents and families should focus on’.