Share your homeschooling tips and learning resource recommendations please

[TinaMumsnet]

Hello,

It's been announced that schools in Wales and Scotland are closing by the end of the week, and it's looking likely that schools in England will follow soon.

We thought it might be helpful to start a thread where Mumsnetters who've been there before could share tips and resources.

If you're a teacher or already homeschoolingdo you have any advice for those of us who are new to this?

What schedules do you follow?
Are there any online resources you would recommend?
How can parents who are working from home also make sure their children keep learning when schools close?
How do you stay sane?

TIA

Agree wholeheartedly with above post TackTriceratops, and others saying don't try to duplicate school at home. When I was a kid, we went on a 6 week boat trip round the world- about a week in my mum discovered I'd been keeping a diary. "Oh that's nice, I'd love to see you write in that every day" - and suddenly I lost interest in the whole thing.The best thing about homeschooling (in the loosest sense) is being able to sleep in in the morning. Sleep is good.

user246854 Try Maths Seeds and Reading Eggs as they have free trials, you could also do Teach Your Monster to Read which is free and DS loved at that age. Twinkl usually has a free trial too. Try WHSmiths for some books as well. Primary Leap are great too for kids from 4 - 11.

@user246854 can't recommend reading eggs and mathseeds highly enough.

Are your kids stuck at home due to school closures?

Check out the new daily Stuck At Home podcast from the UK’s children’s radio station Fun Kids.

Our presenters (who are also stuck at home) are giving kids a daily show packed with activities they can do, entertainment and educational elements too.

Kids can get involved too, not only with the activities, but also by getting in touch and getting involved virtually.

Keep the kids entertained and keep their minds active by downloading the Stuck At Home podcast for free from wherever you get your podcasts.

www.podfollow.com/stuck

There are a load of good free online resources you can use which people have recommended. I'm going down the route of using these and also using private tutoring too but in an online format:

www.varsityonlineeducation.co.uk offers a really great combination of classes and one on one tutoring which has worked well for my daughter so far. It's handy that it's online at the moment too!

Hamilton Trust has published some great learning packs this week for using at home. Schools have given us some links but I'll also be used this with my youngest. They're all free too!
www.hamilton-trust.org.uk/blog/learning-home-packs/

Brilliant stuff here, thanks for all the links & info.

Just seen that the quiz site Sporcle has set up a special area for kids. Could be useful. Sporcle is a great place to idle away the time anyway, lots of content you could argue is educational, and it's a pretty safe site for younger quizzers, as they don't allow profanity, explicit sexual content etc. Plenty of under-18s on there as registered users and quizmakers, and their Admin are very quick to follow up reports of inappropriate content, direct messages etc etc.

www.sporcle.com/kids/

Online School open with 24/7 access for £4.80 a week. See www.myowntutorcatford.co.uk for more information.

I’m a primary school teacher and started home schooling my primary age children a year or so ago. Although our lifestyle isn’t changing as dramatically as most we have had to adapt to this too as we socialise a lot at groups and sport/music activities, Cubs etc.

Here are my tips:

Don’t try to replicate school. What they do in an hour at school can be done so much quicker on a one to one. So for example my Y2 child can do maths in 15-20 mins and my older child can do it in 20-30 mins. Short focused sessions are a lot more successful.

Do the academic stuff in a morning then leave afternoons for more informal activities such as baking, gardening, art, crafts, Lego/construction, exercise, podcasts, board games, the list is endless depending on your child’s interests. Yesterday for example I gave the kids a pulley system (Amazon £6) and they spent an hour lowering and raising their soft toys in a basket up and down from an upstairs window 😆 (obviously I was there the whole time supervising!). They didn’t know they were doing a science objective but I did:)

Make sure they run about or bounce if you have a trampoline. I try to get them to do this in a morning before ‘lessons’, again at a break and as much as they like in an afternoon. Luckily the weather is getting better now thank goodness. Exercise keeps us all sane and healthy.

There have been so many recommendations above for website so I won’t add many but I just wanted to reply to the poster with the 5 year old looking for maths games. Try the website ‘top marks’. It’s free and v good.

Reading too. Whenever you can that suits your family. We tend not to read in our homeschool day but at bedtime they can’t get enough. They read aloud to me, I read aloud to them and we share information books too. So much learning goes on at that time. Make sure you incorporate time to do this as in going up and getting ready for bed earlier than normal so there’s no rushing.

Last thing I’d say is do not worry about children ‘falling behind’ during this time. Everyone is in the same boat and the most important thing right now is everyone staying healthy and sane. Academic success is not the be all and end all of life. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to spend quality time with our children. And to teach them some life skills.

Hope this helps someone. Take care everyone x

Thanks for all the great suggestions here. I just wondered if anyone could suggest the best way for a child to keep an online diary, just to be shared within the family (I am nervous about public blogging)?

I think its a difficult one at the moment. I am working from home so I definitely can't spend 9 - 4 with my son every day and I also am not sure how well he would respond to that. The only solution that I think will be viable for my situation is by using tutors although it can be hard to find ones that are trustworthy and don't charge the world!

There are online tutoring platforms which are good but I am keen to develop a relationship with the tutor if I am using them long term.

The one I have used in the past, mainly because the tutors are young and enthusiastic is www.varsityonlineeducation.co.uk/ and they have always been great to me. They are also online which is useful now.

Is there a thread somewhere to discuss online tutoring as that would be really useful??

MrsPerks how old is your child? Both my DCs are doing blogs, which I set up for them as part of our homeschooling.

Here's my DD's: www.awesomecerys.wordpress.com

She's nearly 7 and her blog's about homeschooling and being stuck at home (which she seems to be enjoying so far!). She's really getting into it and has come up with all the ideas for posts herself so far. I thought she'd take a lot more prompting.

My 11yo DS's blog is here: councilofrandomness.wordpress.com/

He's getting really into learning 3D moddelling - something he tried about 6 months ago and was a bit too complicated but seems to be flying now. One of the luxuries of homeschooling, of course, is you can let your kids develop stuff they're really into, so he's spending lots of time on that and updating the blog every so often.

We've made our blogs public, but with me very closely monitoring what's going on to it. e.g. neither can post pictures that would identify them to someone who didn't already know them.

Also I'm moderating all comments, I see them before the DC do so nothing dodgy can get through to them.

But you can do a private blog.

We're using the free version of wordpress.com; you can set the whole site to private and give access only to specific people e.g. your family.

We might do that another time as it'd be nice to be able to share photos with the family.

But for this project the DC wanted their friends who are also stuck at home to see it and it was easier to do this so we can share via the class whatsapp group etc without having to collect everyone's email address.

Before starting the blog, I got them both to do an exercise to answer the following questions:

1. who is the "audience" (i.e. who do you want to look at your website).

1. What content will there be on your blog? (e.g. what will it be about?)

1. What formats will you use? (e.g. videos, photos, your own drawings, poems, etc)

1. What will the title be?

1. What will the "strapline be"? (A few words under the title explaining what the sire is about.

1. Anything else

I got them to do this from their own heads, them gave then a few children's blogs to look at (I found them via googling) and we looked at them and talked about what we liked about them. Then went back to the questions above and updated them.

This really helped them with planning it.

Good luck, it's going really well here, hope it works well for you too! Please feel free to PM me if you get stuck! I do this kind of stuff for work.

*modelling!

This is a really good Facebook page with a step by step guide to supporting home learning. Lots of hints and tips!

www.facebook.com/LWLUK

Thank you so much for all the advice and suggestions Whatday - that's brilliant and very kind of you.

I look forward to looking at your DCs blogs with my DS later on. He's 10 so likely to be very inspired by these.

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Remote learning is going to be a huge change for everyone. Let’s look at it as a window opening, rather than a door closing. This is a wonderful opportunity to try something new rather than do things the way we’ve always done them before.

We’re here to offer your children a free creative thinking tool called QWERTY®. You can read about it at www.got-a-head.com/qwerty or see some free YouTube tutorials tinyurl.com/r3npwuz on how to use it. There are also plenty of blogs on our website about QWERTY® as well as other learning activities you can do with children. All free.

Got-A-Head®? is a small start-up company comprising two parents of a ten-year-old. We have been working on techniques and strategies to help those in the 8-14 age range develop their learning skills. Not subject-specific learning, as there are plenty of people who offer that already. We want children to learn how to learn so they are more efficient learners in whatever they turn their hands (or minds!) to.

The QWERTY® resources are free for you to use in these difficult days. However, we’d really love to know how people are getting on with QWERTY®, so if you sign up as a beta tester, we’ll give you plenty of remote support on how best to use it for your own project(s). www.got-a-head.com/qwerty-beta-testing

Enjoy using QWERTY® and the other resources. We hope to hear from you.

For GCSE English this YouTube channel is amazing, I used to use it as a revision tool with classes: www.youtube.com/user/mrbruff