Are you ‘homeschooling’?

[CalamariDreams]

Just pondering over the return to primary schools and wondered how many are actually still doing regular homelearning with their primary kids?

E.g a few hours a day of worksheets, online, some sort of learning?

YABU = Yes, still home learning
YANBU = Not currently/haven’t ever

We are doing 9-3 or 4ish

Including a lunch break and a fair amount of ‘chill’ time - usually ends up being Lego or board games.

Doing PE at 9am often kids yoga but have tried all sorts. Always do maths, reading and writing every day and then alternate between learning about animals, science (maddie moate a feature!), active stuff (bike rides), baking, history (into spitfires so VE Day good, art, geography etc...

Tbh we all need the structure. I’m sure DC would learn more at school but it’s good for everyone to be gainfully occupied during the week days. I’d say general knowledge definitely improving and other stuff is at least not slipping.

5 year old DD in year 1.

We're doing 1 activity a day at least, sometimes two. And we always watch the teachers story time.

Otherwise it's baking or building or educational games on the tablet for the rest of time.

We're doing tonnes tbh. The school is sending home lots of work sheets and assignments. Some of the projects have really caught the DCs' imagination and they've spent hours on them.
We're also playing in the garden each day and exercising. And I'm working from home.

No as we both still working FT so impossible

Yep...still doing it here.
Not the stuff the school sends.
DS is academiclly behind and the majority of it is too advanced for him.
Plus, the few times I've submitted stuff it hasn't been marked, or aknowledged even.
So I'm sort of free styling with shop bought work books and Reading Eggs.
I'm also booking him into classes with a company called Outschool who do classes over Zoom. I'd highly recommend Mr. Powell's history classes.
And I pay a local teenager to Skype him for a chat in Gaelic twice a week.
DD has not started school yet but I've put her on Reading Eggs in the hopes of not repeating the complacency that saw poor DS fall behind. You live and learn.
In total it takes around two to three hours per day. There were complaints and tantrums at first but we're through that now.

I don't have to do much to be fair. My older two are expected to follow their school timetable. They download their work via the school website, do the work. If it's on the computer they have a place to upload it to. If it's on paper they take photos to upload. I only get involved if the school contacts me to say they haven't done something (mostly my eldest with ASD struggling with organisation). My youngest gets worksheets from school to do. I find him the odd extra thing to do but mostly I'm happy if he's not on Youtube during the "school day". I think them keeping busy is better for their mental health. We do PE with Joe every morning as well.

Yes, but we have been home schooling for 6 years now, so we've got a bit of a head start on this! DS (13) does around 2-3 hours a day and DD (14) more like 3-4 as she is taking some GCSEs next year (yr10). Plus they do music practice, sports and clubs (before lockdown) on top. Both mostly work independently and set their own time tables. I still have to go out to work 6 hours per day, and an hour or two of study in the evenings.

My oldest are doing online teaching set by their high school. I am teaching the younger two.

We do :-
: handwriting practice
: multiplication test using flash cards
: math work using revision cards
: english work using revision cards
: spelling practise
: story writing

That takes us around 3 hours, we leave afternoons for their play and for me to rest

We do get a lot of topic work from the teachers but I am not well enough to teach each child individual to the teachers plans.
I need stuff that I can teach them both together. So I hope to improve their basic necessary skills whilst they are home with me. Their teachers know what we are doing and are supportive of my plan, thank goodness.

Supplementing school stuff with other stuff, as well as some baking, and letting DC have some 'creative' time to just paint, draw, faff in the garden.
However, some of the school stuff isn't at all challenging so we did look at some material for the next key stage which was relevant to this week's lessons.

We’re on and off. They’re doing work set by the school and they’ve started their own projects following some STEM and coding sites.
Some days they can’t be bothered and other days, they just get drawn in to whatever they’re doing.

@Youngatheart76 thanks for the Harry Potter stuff. Me and ds are working through the audio books so he'll love that.

We're still doing home school. Ds has a jar with tasks in - independent reading, maths textbook, ICT, art, handwriting, timetables rockstars etc. He has to choose and do 5 through the day. We're not strict on timings though and it fits better with us both wfh too.

Ds is 7 and We're doing oak academy as recommended by the school. We started a week late, so we just work a week behind. It's great as it has continuity and structure and the lessons are relatively short.
We don't do Joe Wicks any more but ds will quite often just go for a jump on the trampoline a few times a day.
We start work roughly about 9ish and do the 3 lessons through Oak, we usually have a few tasks through school that we can do if we want to and my ds usually does a draw with Rob on Tuesday and Thursday, which he loves (never used to be in to drawing
Before watching Robs tutorials!) then we always make sure that he does some independent reading.
I'm a midday supervisor and obviously not working right now so I can easily spend the day sat with him going through the school work. I would find it really, really difficult to do that if I had to work from home and home school. I also have a dd who is 15 and in year 10, she's trying to keep on top of her work as much as she can. Her mental health is really suffering though.

My eldest is 15, she's been amazing- cracking on with her work, mostly online. I'm offering help but it's mostly beyond me if I'm honest 🤷‍♀️
My youngest is in year 5. She was given a pack to work through when school closed, we've done most of it. We're doing the bbc bitesize activities every day and then she's got projects to do aswell. We do loads some days, very little others. Today we gave up after 15 minutes because she got upset when she got some sums wrong, late night last night so I put it down to tiredness and we laid on the sofa watching a film instead. I don't think the uncertainty about when/ if she'll get back to school before the Summer holidays is helping, it's hard to know what to tell them when you don't know yourself. Tomorrow's another day.

Yes every weekday but the expectation is only an hour or two per day plus educational games etc. It ends up taking most of the afternoon.

Two kids, they split up and each join one of us in our ‘offices’ while we work. I don’t push it with my daughter if she can’t get the tech to work. She’s a diligent student and doesn’t give up easily. My son (age 8) needs constant supervision to keep going.

We seem to be "home educating" rather than "homeschooling" like some here. Noway would we want to be doing 9-3, i am truly loving the time for creative and imaginative play that mine started coming up with a ciuple of weeks in.

We do some form of cooking each day - it might be scones or brownies or omelettes or scrambled eggs but something they can learn to themselves, so many days they will rustle up something.

Wr try to do a form of exercise each day - a walk or joe wicks. We dont always do this.

They aim to do a maths exercise a day (20mins) but many days they don't and then catch up a bit quicker.

We've done harry potter listen and questions. Much essier than normal English but gets them thinking and we did it as a family. We've written to family, but not a lot of writing so far.

And then lots of cinversarion and games.

So probably 20-40mins formal work of which 20min maybe on a tablet maths app sat anywhere in the house

Im a teacher and for me I don't see the point of replicating school conditions or trying to make them sit still all day when they've got an unprecidented opportunity to be creative and play in a way our curriculum limits. (I completely respect everyone's right to do it in a way that works for them, i just really dont think 9-3 schooling should be seen as "better" per se as I dont think it is!)

And typing on a phone isnt one of my skills 🤦‍♀️

DD is in year 5 and has her 11+ in September so we have to maintain a good standard of work as much as possible. We homeschool between 10-2 and that's enough time to get everything done (including school work and 11+ prep).

3 boys here aged 7, 5 and 1 and a half. The biggest problem is the toddler! My oldest 2 will so some work but need help and the toddler also requires almost constant attention unless I give him a screen which I don't like doing. I have to admit though we did start off more organised and things have gradually slipped. My 7 year old probably does about 1 hour max formal learning a day from Oak academy or work books and he was also great at reading his own books and writing them in the beginning. Things have admittedly tailed off a bit. I think my mind has been preoccupied with all that's been going on and I've probably not been as focused as I need to be. 5 year old does short bursts of learning which probably add up to half an hour a day.

How much / what mine do varies by child.

Y9 ds does about 5 hours. He could do it in 3, but he’s slow! It’s 5 subjects a day, set by school. He only needs help occasionally, and so far I’ve been able to explain everything needed. I need to work on getting him to answer more in depth but he just wants to get it done rather than done well.

Y8 dd is very organised, works 8-12 and goes into more depth than school requires. I’ve only needed to give tech help.

Y3 ds is quite resistant to work! He does 30 minutes of times tables, education city and reading plus websites, plus the occasional oak academy. I’m mostly working on getting him to sit and do it, and managing his tantrums. He also FaceTimes friends regularly.

Summer born Y2 ds was (is) hugely behind on reading (previously had help for speech too) so can’t work independently at all. He doesn’t like the websites y3 ds uses, so only occasionally does them, and says bbc bitesize and oak academy are for babies (think it’s the teaching style). He does 3 days of maths worksheets if I’ve been in work (nights) as he can do those well once I get him started. Other days it’s either 1 English worksheet (all he can do as he finds more very stressful) or reading a chapter book with me (he reads a page, then I do). He’s definitely got better at reading: he was on stage 4/ red Oxford books before this! Obviously, his y3 brother who loves reading thinks this is hugely unfair, so tantrums ensue...

I’m not doing too well with all this. It’s a combination of having to divide my attention between 4 dc at very different stages, working nights in hospital and dh being in work/ wfh. I’m just aiming for the eldest 2 to keep up, the 8yo to improve his behaviour and get something done and the 6yo to learn to read/ get enough confidence to read his worksheets. Not great, unfortunately!

1-2 hours for my y1 dd but we've missed the odd day as I'm pregnant and sickness is kicking my ass so battling with her is not always possible

Yes, with a lot of breaks. I'm furloughed so I've got the time. We normally do PE with Joe Wicks at 9am, then maths and English work to get it out the way. Then in the afternoon we go out for a walk and do fun things, science experiments, art, baking.

We have been diligently home schooling 6 hours a day as school have sent lots of links and aren’t marking a damn thing. So of course along with most of the rest of the parents who aren’t teachers and who work we are struggling... and it’s come at at the expense of our work, and our relationship with the children and their friendship with each other... it’s not really working anymore in its current form! It’s draining and we can’t keep it up. Im resentful of finishing my own work really late to accommodate.

@hepburnmed

I am an ex- teacher and have worked as a tutor too.

I would recommend 30-60 minutes of focused teaching with your children (depending on how many you have).

It's more valuable to have a small amount of dedicated, focused, undistracted 1-2-1 work than dragging it over many hours in an unproductive way.

I give the kids work and then disappear to my home office for 8 hours. They do a bit of it. I'm a lone parent working full time, home schooling was never realistic

I'm a single mum working fulltime from home in quite a demanding job that needs a high amount of focus. DD14 is working well and independently and doing what her school sets. DS10 does nothing all day bar play on his xbox and watch TV/YouTube. I try and do an hour of maths with him each day after I have finished work and he still has a maths tutor once per week who has switched to online.