Coronavirus

[Rocsand03]

If this was to actually happen due to this virus going around, what would you do with your teenagers? Would you make them home study or just be at home? My thoughts are work but my teen is so stubborn I can’t get him to do it just now never mind if that happened. How do people encourage/ make sure revision is being done? Sorry I think I have asked something similar before but just don’t want to be stuck in a rutt if the time comes..... also, how do you actually know what your children have home? His bag is a dogs dinner with papers and wrecked jitters. I can’t make sense of anything in there. I’ve always bought him wallets to keep homework organised but he’s now decided he doesn’t need them.. he does

My son has recently turned 17 and is doing his A levels at a huge 6th form college in another county. I am totally expecting it to shut at some point, especially as the intake is so huge and varied.

Ds has told me that if it happens he will have loads to do anyway and revision for mocks etc. I am under no illusion that he will go on his xbox and I have no problem with that as he’s always self regulated anyway.
He gets up at 6.30am for college so that would change for starters so the day would be much shorter for him but he would stay up later no doubt.

When he was doing his GCSE’s last year we sat down together and devised a revision timetable. I bought him every CGP book that I could from WH Smith for revision and re-did all of his folders and wallets with inserts etc to make life as easy as possible, especially as he has Aspergers and tends to worry a lot.
He did very well and knows that his hard work paid off. Some of his close friends did very little revision and this was reflected in their grades and in some cases, they weren’t allowed to do A levels due to not getting the required grades so he knows full well if he does nothing then it’s only him that will pay the price further down the line.

Lastly, he started revising from January and worked on his weakest subjects a lot.
Hope that helps

Mine is 14. I’d like to think we can trust he will go over his work but unless he gets homework which he does do but it’s very rare he gets any these days compared to us getting six books home a night. Doing that is great but I really want him to realise next year is exam year and it’s going to get busier. He’s not been getting good class test results and it worries me. Everybody, teachers, husband all day he’s doing fine, keep doing what he’s doing, we can’t force him..... what’s the point of us then if we don’t encourage and get him organised in a way that it makes him realise the importance of his efforts?

Roc I would say that organisation is the number one thing that makes the biggest difference. Ds was overwhelmed with the sheer amount of paper that he had and it took a good few hours to organise his work but it made life so much easier. I also bought him a different colour ring binder for every GCSE subject, again from WHSmith which were under £2 each and got him a nice desk and leather swivel chair to do his work.

There were no excuses as to why he couldn’t revise! Also he was encouraged to go to every single revision class after school which meant missing the school bus home but were invaluable as much smaller classes.

If the school set work to be done at home then I'd enforce it being done above devices. But if there's no one there to set the work and none is sent home then I'd likely not look for additional tasks for them to do.

I'm worried about this. Mainly I'm worried about how I'll keep DD (16) in the house. She's very, very sociable and spends most of her time flitting between different people's houses and various parties, or her BF's. She keeps on top of her Alevel work so it's fine normally. But she can't stay in for a single evening without getting bored. If she has to stay home for weeks she's going to find that really hard. I'm trying to get her used to the possibility, but it's not going to be easy.

In terms of study, I think I'd try to do as much as possible to help structure the day. Regular family meal times, getting up in the morning, etc. I might go back to switching the router off at night to help them stay in routines. And encourage group chats with classmates and phone calls/facetime.

I've started to drip feed the possibility into conversation. Ds is y11 and hoping to do a sport level 2 (or something!) next year at college, so joked that he would have to set up a home exercise programme for us. He'll be a nightmare because he's an athlete so is going to really struggle if he can't play sport/run. Academically I think he'll actually do ok at home, once he knows what he's doing he's quite focused. And I pointed out that if there were issues with exam taking, then the work he does now could be more important.
I'll also give him more cooking duties and try to keep to a bit of a routine (no crazy late nights). I think we're going to struggle with broadband capacity, so he won't be able to Xbox all-day if we are on meetings etc for work.