Homeschooling : The Return

[ilkleymoorbartat]

Please please can I have your ideas of schedules / how much work we should be doing per day / how much we should be 'encouraging (pushing) a year 1 boy.

Last time it was pretty hard to get him to do any learning at all, and quite frankly caused myself a mountain or extra work attempting it at all. School were rubbish, and just sent home vague ideas of stuff we could do. Although I guess it didn't matter too much because he was in reception. Now he's in year 1 and I really don't want him to fall behind any more.

So any tips about the above would be a huge help!!

I have a year 2, a year 1 and a toddler who will also be at home full time. I need to spend my days job hunting so we can afford to live going forward (lost my job, DH had to take an 80% pay cut). We have one laptop.
Mine will be doing a bit of reading and that’s basically it.

Sorry a 20% pay cut, not 80%. Too stressed to think straight.

@MistletoeandGin do your job searching in the evening. If you work ft you have to do this anyway.

Year 1&2 can cover a lot of the same things. Revision of phonics. Reading the same books. You can have toddler in your lap while you ask them each to read a passage from a book. Sure it might be easy for year 2 dc but it's better than nothing.
Youtube has a lot of educational videos that can just be shown to both older dc. Things like number bond videos or ks1 shapes etc.

@SinisterBumFacedCat Maths factor and Outschool are good places to start, and maybe look at subscriptions like kiwico, toucan box or letters from afar depending on your child's interests.

Please remember that last time the government told schools to suspend the curriculum so any work provided was at the discretion of the school, there was no standard set. This time schools have been required to submit detailed plans by end of September of how they will provide remote learning in the event of national lockdown or year group isolating. The requirement for primary is 3 hours a day. This can include reading time and life skills eg cooking, cleaning, gardening etc so won’t equate to 3 hours of children sitting down writing. Please remember it doesn’t have to be live lessons either

If your school doesn’t provide this then you can report to LEA

I was distracted when I wrote my reply that I didn't give an idea of schedule/how much we do... It depends on how interested she is, if it's a struggle then I don't force it and ask her to do one section on maths factor then a nice snack as a reward, maybe one or two worksheets then a reward etc.. So maybe one hour. Quite often she'll get interested in a topic and want to carry on just watching videos and writing about that, or do lots of reading one day and not much else. I choose my battles and follow her interests mainly. We have an allotment which really helps with home learning too.

OP on workbooks I like the CGP books. Available on their website or Amazon. Not expensive. My children are also out and I’m assuming we are in this for the medium term so have got some in.

@ArosAdraDrosDolig

Year 1? As in 5-6 years old? Just play with him.

As an ex teacher.... this is not great advice.

Obviously playing with him is good, especially games with an educational slant but year 1 is where they start learning to do more ‘traditional’ work. We may not agree with it etc.etc. But you are doing your child no favours if you don’t work towards him sitting and doing some ‘work’ every day.

And what you have been doing OP seems great!

Honestly, be led by him.
If he doesn’t want to learn, don’t push him, you’ll end up arguing and it will be counter productive. Scrap school for that day and do something else. Things like maths are so built into other things like cooking.
He won’t fall behind his peers, he has you focused and engaged. That’s more than a lot of kids have.

On the days he’s feeling it, do bits in the morning and more “fun” in the afternoon.
Do not under estimate the power of reading with him and just simple things like colouring helps with hand writing.

as an ex primary teacher I would say

1. play is really important, and valuable, so don't beat yourself up if he does a lot of play! You can add/stretch the play if you like, eg, if they like lego, set them a challenge - can you build a bridge to cross this 'river' on the floor. If they like art, have a go at getting them to draw something real, eg a spiky houseplant - get them to really look at it and have a go at drawing.
2. The 3 things that really will make a difference in terms of actual work are

reading - 20 minutes per day, read and chat about it. Don't feel that you have to stick to school books, in fact anything will do. Libraries are open for click and collect, or else buy cheap on Amazon. Read fact and fiction and poetry. Get him reading to you, but also make space in the day for you reading to him. Read something aloud that is harder than he could read for himself. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is a great book for year 1 listening. writing - this was shown to be one area where kids dropped back significantly in first lockdown. Write every day. Keep a dairy, 2-3 sentences per day, or write a continuing story, a bit each day, or write down recipes or a letter to grandma, or make up an acrostic poem, or write what he thinks will come next in the story you are reading. Sit together, be encouraging, comment on content, don't stress over spellings etc at this point. If he can comfortably write 2-3 sentences, encourage a bit more. Talk about capital letters and full stops, get him to work out spellings using simple phonics, but just one or two things per writing. Write for 15 minutes. Maths - this was also an area where children dropped back during lockdown. Lots of maths can be aural if he is a reluctant pen and paper person! Counting, adding, subtracting, using maths to measure, to cook, to work out shopping. Get him involved in household maths - how many tomatoes do I need for lunch? How many Christmas decorations are going in each box as we pack away? What if I have 1 more? 2 more? 7 more? What if I ate one? How many left? What if the pack has 10, and everyone in the family eats one, how many left? and so on.

In first lockdown, I kept posting to encourage parents of young children that they will be fine with a few weeks out of school. Not to panic, do lots of good play, and keep reading.

But that stretched into 6 months,
Then kids were self isolating on and off and in and out of school.
Then November lockdown.
Now January?....

really, if you are not now doing some home schooling with kids when they are out of school, this will have a long term effect on their education.

Of course every house is different. If you already do lots of reading, writing for fun and household maths and your child is 6, then you probably have it covered. But in my experience, most parents do great play and creative stuff, and lots of reading, but writing and maths are not integrated well at home. This was shown to be true by the results of tests to see where children's education had suffered.

So, sorry, but no, just letting them play is no longer an option.

But learning age 5/6 should not be all paper and pen and worksheets. That is pretty boring stuff, so making it part of real life is great.
Write the shipping list together. Get them to read it out as you go to shop (or order online) get them to add up some of the things you need (prices are a bit complex at this age, so simplify - £2 plus £12 etc)

SoscaredforJan

Also an ex teacher, I respectfully disagree with you.

I did the whole 'play, do a bit of reading etc' during the first lockdown and I only realised towards the end how far behind my DC was. We had to spend the some of the Summer focusing on reading & writing and I subscribed to Maths Factor to catch up. I'm definitely not going to waste time this lockdown and will be treating it like a normal school day. This time the school are doing online lessons which has helped my DC focus. There's plenty of time to play once they've finished their school work.

@ilkleymoorbartat

Sorry to seem ignorant *@MotherExtraordinaire* but what are the usual workbooks?

Sorry. Cgp are a good starting point and used by many schools. And would be my starting point. 😊

I home-ed our DC, 9 & 7. I plan a lesson on a different subject each day with a view to it taking around 10 minutes of instruction, plus another 20-30 minutes of worksheets. CGP are great for workbooks. More often than not, something in the lesson will trigger them to do more research in a book, or draw a picture, or build something out of Lego, & so the learning continues & consolidates through most of the day.

Many of the resources we use are subscription-based & some can be quite expensive if you're not opportunistic with offers or part of a home-ed group that can get group discounts. We've recently discovered Prodigy which is a maths game, a little like Pokémon. We just use the free version, although may consider paying for the extras at some point. My DC have gone from whinging any time I ask them to write anything mathematical to voluntarily getting paper & pencil to solve the maths that they begged to do! I'm not a massive fan of screen time but I'm a little more relaxed about it if it's an educational thing that they're actively doing.

I can do a list of all the resources we use if that'd be helpful, but I suspect for a temporary school closure/lockdown situation it probably wouldn't be worth signing up to lots of things!

The hardest part with that age is getting into the habits -- and with so much going on and uncertainty, it's a struggle.

For Y1, I used I See Sam readers (there are free PDFs online), copywork (copy words and sentences onto either a whiteboard or paper from wherever), front and back of a page of maths www.homeschoolmath.net has free worksheet generator, though if you can afford and want something with more instruction details or more variety with word problems and such, Math Mammoth by the same person has a range of workbooks, both PDF and print. Some of mine required more due to SEN, but that's the academic foundation and light on set-up time for parents.

Beyond that, reading aloud (having them summarize it back or discuss the story/facts in non-fiction helps build important skills), exploring any spaces available to you, life skills, and google activities on any areas of interest you and them have.

For a routine, I would do after breakfast whichever area they're struggling with most first when they have the most focus, with whatever their favourite as a reward right after. So with my oldest, it was English tasks and then maths, while for all my other children it was maths followed by my reading a story, then them summarizing that before they worked on reading their own story & the rest of their English tasks after). I know others tend to be a slower warm up and benefit doing an easier task first, then a harder task, then a reward one might work better - it depends on the child.

Doing an hour in the morning and - if really worried - another hour after lunch with lots of free exploring and story time throughout the day (Librivox classic audio stories can be great) should be fine.

Thank you all, some brilliant help on here!

Mine is slightly older, but we were given work to do each day. This included learning time tables, spellings, writing, maths and history, geography and art work too. We did most of that, alongside baking, walks and play. I found that most tasks took very little time as one child is fairly fast.

For me the stress came into the fact that I was also working and that mum knows nothing

Starting again tomorrow with timetables, a maths worksheet and getting him to do lots of reading. Nothing set by school yet.

For some children, it really helps to have a check list. For younger children using symbols/little drawings can work with words.

A whiteboard if useful for this, or a chalkboard.

They have a list of tasks, a framework for the day. You can give some choice (shall be do maths or reading next?) but they know that by the end of the day everything will be ticked off.

Some kids like it like a timetable, including snack time, walk time, lunch time. Others prefer a list of tasks that they can do in any order and then when they are all done they are free.

It is a good way to make the day structured.
My friend who home eds, always includes a fun bit in hers, may be - eat and apple, or worki on your lego for half an hour etc. He gets excited coming down and seeing what is on the list for today.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/actions-for-schools-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak/guidance-for-full-opening-schools#res