How much help do you give?

[1Pinkfluffyelephant]

In the current situation of home schooling. I am just curious as to how much your 7/8 year olds get on with certain aspects of their school work..... maths work she is able to just get on and do. However, when it comes to English research topics where she needs to use the internet to get info to create a piece of informative writing she can’t manage it. Should I be sat with her typing questions etc in and pointing out the relevant information (feels like I would be doing the important bits for her) or should she be able to do this her self?

I wouldn't expect her to be able to do it for herself. Ask her how they do it at school? Maybe print out a couple of pieces and see if she can highlight some of the information she might need, but be prepared to support.

Well,if she is floundering you need to teach her. With my DD in Y4, I will show her first time, then ask if she was able to follow what I did and was it clear. Then next time, I'll ask if she wants to try by herself. If not, then I'll do it again, but I'll ask her questions like "do you remember what to do next" or "do you know why I'm going it this way"
Then the next time I encourage her to try but I watch over her shoulder in case she needs me to jump in and help.

And then next I'll get her to tell me what she thinks she needs to do before she does it, so I know she is going to do roughly the right thing, and then I'll encourage her to have a go by herself.

With computer work, it can be very frustrating when you are slow at typing and can't control a mouse fully. And yet learning by doing is THE best way to learn. Making sure that the principle is, it is fine to make mistakes.

To be honest this is how I train people at work, more or less! Probably not the Ofsted approved approach.

My ds is year 6 if he needs help I give it. I don’t do it for him I just point him in the right direction. If they were in the classroom I would expect them to be able to ask for help.

As much as they need (but not doing it for them!). My Yr4 is (suspected) dyslexic, so I'll type stuff into a search engine for her that she tells me to get the right spelling, we would read through a passage together, if she needs helping spelling something I would write it down or help her find it in the dictionary... I do the same with my Yr2 as well. I would go through a maths worksheet to check they understand what to do. When I 'mark' their work, I'll explain wrong answers.

It helps I'm not trying to work at the same time.

Just to clarify I never just abandon her to do her work and expect her to get on with it.
With her maths- I always ask her if she understands what to do and if not we go over it and do it together a few times until she understands it. But with her English I feel like she tells me she knows what questions she has to answer and knows how to type things into google (she has been given the questions to answer so can copy spellings etc) but when it comes to getting the information she struggles to notice when she is repeating her self or using the same information for two different questions. I wasn’t sure if she was just not bothering to read things properly or concentrate on what she was actually reading because she just writes the first thing that pops up but can’t explain what the paragraph has just told her. It’s that tricky age where she sometimes tries to pretend she can’t do things to get people to do it for her.