I’m not smart enough to home school

[Woman31]

Iv left it late to start homeschooling. We started today and my god I’m not smart enough for this. There is so much work Dd12 needs to do and not much for ds10 to do.

Our first lesson is science.

I’m way out of my comfort zone 😩

There’s things like Microsoft teams(?) where they have live lessons. Loads of different work for different lessons. I don’t know how to go about it 😩

First of all - well done for getting started. Second - I fear that a lot of people are going to come out of this thinking they are teachers. Teaching/planning/assessing a classroom of 35 is very different to supporting your child at home. You definitely shouldn't be pressuring yourself to teach your child anything new, this is not what schools expect. Simply reinforce learning they have already completed. Have you been send a list of websites or learning packs to complete? If so, start from there - it's up to your children to show they can do it through the methods they've been taught at school.

Sorry, sent*.

Don’t panic, for science, go online and find experiments to do- even for ks2, my children love doing younger experiments even if they are teens!

Then get your children to go online and find out why the chemical reaction happened and write about it/draw it.

Don’t worry about the serious learning for now, even going over younger stuff is a good way to see if your children have remembered what they’ve learned in the past.

Change your mind set. You’re not home schooling. You’re helping your child complete the work that’s been set by the school. If they can’t do it, email the teacher for help. If that doesn’t help, it’ll get fixed when they’re back at school.

What science work / topic has been set???

As others have you don't have to teach them but maybe be on hand to help.

Thank you.

It’s stuff like this! English is currently “the winter’s tale”?! But it’s the same for every subject 😩

Do the children understand what to do? I don't know kerboodle, but maybe they use it at school already? Email the teacher with questions from the dc if they are stuck.

Break it up so do a task or so a day. So today's task could just be looking up the elements using the textbook on kaboodle and google a periodic table. They don't have to be elements no one has ever heard of. So say gold, oxygen, iron and neon perhaps Keep it simple

Then tomorrow do task 2 maybe 3 if the kids are on a roll

The teachers should still be available for help. My friend is in a similar situation, she feels overwhelmed with trying to do it all, but don't forget, the kids aren't at school and this is an extremely difficult situation for everyone so do try and take the pressure off yourself. Try and contact school, ask for some help. And don't forget it's Easter holidays from the end of this week, we plan to barely do any school work for those weeks. We'll keep up with some of the maths (ds is year 5 so it's largely app/game based) and reading. But don't worry, you don't have to do it alone. Ask for help, just like you'd tell your kids to at school

Break that into smaller chunks, start with them googling a periodic table and choosing the 10 elements they want to research, then they google facts about each one. They don’t have to do it all in one go, setting a timer helps. My ds are younger (10 and 8) and we do 30min blocks with lots of playing in the garden and drawing thrown in.

My son is 12 and we are overwhelmed with all the online work. He cant remember how to access his school email account , we cant log in to say heggity maths and I am still twenty years behind in technology and just learnt to email. So he is doing the odd homework on a sheet of paper( an hour a day?) and I'm taking a pic and sending it to the school via email.
Had a few replies from teachers saying well done to my son and keep up the good work and just do what you can.

So you missed a week of live lessons? It doesn’t seem you need to do that much yourself, just follow the instructions from the teachers how to access the leasons.

The 12 year old should be able to work through the work themselves and submit it online, assuming no SEN? That's what my 13 year old is doing, and what I'd expect from year 7 or 8 too. The 10 year old should be able to work mostly independently with some guidance. There are so many resources online these days.

Well done on being honest though.. this whole situation has thrown us into the deep end . As the others said, just do a bit at a time. The periodic table elements task should take up enough time today.

Dd is suspected dyslexic, same as me! We are currently fighting for testing.

She’s done some English this morning and my ds did English on espresso which the school told us too.

We have a 3 year old thrown into the mix too so it’s hard getting them all doing something different.

They absolutely loved science this morning. Dd is learning about chemical reactions so we did an experiment and then ds wrote about the chemical reaction in glow sticks and Dd did online work set by teacher about it.

English teacher here with 4 of my own. Teaching is not difficult, its a matter of presenting the information so that the student can understand and remember it. If you have materials like text books you can set assignments to reinforce your childs understanding of the materials, and allow them to practise there writting reading etc... The biggest problem is teaching ones own children at home is more difficult than teaching other peoples children in a classroom environment. To make a daily learning routine that is enforced, is the biggest challenge IMO.