Solving the Home schooling Puzzle!
Reducing the anxiety of teaching your children at home
With many schools staying closed for in-person teaching at the start of term, many “working from home and professional mums are faced with maintaining a work/life balance along with the extra challenges of coping with their child’s online education. Teaching your children can be hard work and even a struggle day in and day out during the lockdown. However, there with a little planning and goal setting you can create a home learning environment for your kids that will facilitate the reduction of anxiety during the current situation.
To succeed in home-schooling you consider the followings:
· Know the key areas to focus on
· Know how to teach in a way that understands with them
· Know how to motivate them and how to implement practical activities in the home
· Know your child learning style and have a study strategy that works for him
· Set up time and space for homeschooling
· Let go of stress and worries if he is falling behind his level, he will catch up soon if he is learning by understanding and not just memorizing the lectures.
Hmm. What would Einstein do?
Einstein put great emphasis on the importance of understanding things. He said that ”Anyone can know. The point is to understand.” He also said that if you can’t explain something to a six-year-old, you don’t understand what you’re explaining. But why is understanding so important? Because when you truly understand something, you can see exactly how it works. It means you can see the patterns and characteristics that make that thing what it is. When you can do that, you can start to imagine how it could be different. However, if you just know something merely at face value, it’s almost impossible to imagine it differently. This is an important concept that is worth some consideration, especially given the pressure placed on both parents and children on the run-up to exams.
The importance of learning from mistakes
Although we work hard to train our children to pass examinations, they do not always understand the concepts they are learning. Children often memorise the subjects to avoid failure leaving many of them stressed and fearing forthcoming exams. I hope that the events of the pandemic will give rise to change. Academic education teaches us that we always have to know the answer to problems. However, how would any discovery or innovation happen if we always had an answer? Academic education teaches us not to make mistakes but it is only by making mistakes and facing challenges that we are forced to formulate novel and creative solutions.
Redefining our children’s Education
At present we have the chance to rebalance the decision on how we want to approach education, especially as we step into the 4th industrial revolution but how will we cope with this challenge? What skills and knowledge will we need to help our children to succeed? How will schools pivot meet these new challenges?
I believe that it’s time to reframe how we think about the situation going forward. In his article, “Learning through play: how schools can educate students through technology” John Goodwin argues:
“While traditional educational metrics of literacy and numeracy are vital, society also requires learners to have a range of holistic skills to thrive in the modern world. These include creative, technology, innovation and interpersonal skills”
In the same article he goes on to postulate that:
“Evidence suggests that learning through play happens when the activity is experienced as joyful, helps children find meaning in what they are doing or learning, involves active, engaged, minds-on thinking, as well as iterative thinking (experimentation, hypothesis testing, etc.) and has opportunities for social interaction. “
Learn to love Learning
Learning to love and embrace learning is an extremely important life skill! There is no need to be stressed out about education as stress always makes the situation worse as does the pressure and unrealistic expectations. I refuse to buy the media stories that: "Kids are falling behind academically" narrative of this pandemic. Kids are only falling behind on a scale the adults are defining for them. Kids are only falling behind if we choose to measure them on scales that may have been broken for decades, and we refuse to see them and change them even when the pandemic brings to light the need for change. Kids aren't falling behind but are rather adapting. They are learning new skills. They are overcoming. Kids are surviving a pandemic that has shaken their world before they have fully understood it.
Nurture not Measure
There are lots of great revision guides which set up the step-by-step foundations to help your child to pass exams making it easy for them to recap. Establishing the love of learning is an important life skill. Although I feel that the current pandemic is temporary I feel the decisions we make about our children’s education during this time will have a longer-term impact. Right now, I feel it’s important to let your child be the greatest version of themselves in their way and time. At this time, I think it is important for parents to put away their measurement tools and show their children lots of love and compassion as they need to be nurtured more than ever before.
Do you need Help?
Are you struggling with homeschooling? Please contact me via my linked in account now to arrange a complimentary conversation to find the study strategy that fits your child situation right now. I look forward to hearing from you 😊 Eva.
#homeschooling#educaciondigital #learninganddevelopment
