Home Schooling By Jonny Lonsdale | Teacher | Youth Coach (... and Dad!)

charlotteaustin
Jul 22, 2020
4 min read

Hi I’m Jonny, I’ve been part of Charlotte's Coaching team for almost 10 years. I’ve also taught in Secondary Schools for 8 years and have had several private tuition students. Myself and my colleagues are currently in the process of setting our students' work to complete while at home during this challenging time.

I’m going to share some tips on how best to prepare and execute the sometimes difficult task of helping your children complete school work at home!

In my view the single most important aspect in all this is to protect your relationships within the family, not only to help with the continuation of education but also for your own and their sanity!

The expectation appears to be that children follow their usual school timetables where possible. This is a good starting point because it allows for a routine and will be a familiar way of learning for them. Below are a few things that might help;

Encourage a regular morning routine: Get up, wash/shower, get dressed, breakfast. If possible it might also be a good idea to get some fresh air, if you are fortunate enough to have space outdoors, suggest a walk round the garden or a dog walk. If not, maybe consider an online 5/10 minute dance along or one of the warm up videos on this page with Amy, our resident Personal Trainer!
Find a space in your home that can be recognised and used as a work space. An area that the children know is the place they will do their schoolwork. With so much material being shared online make sure you find a spot with a solid internet connection.

Lessons in schools that last an hour include teacher presentation, examples, teacher questioning, student questioning, discussion and much more. To expect your children to sit and focus on one type of work/learning style for an hour is likely to be unrealistic and not a fair replication of their school experience. Encourage 10/15 minutes to watch videos, look at examples and then around 25/30 minutes to answer questions. For more practical based subjects the organisation might take longer, but the principles around concentration levels should still apply. It might be an idea to do more practical sessions later in the day.
If your children appear to stall in particular subjects, invest some time in finding out why that is. It’s likely a subject they don’t enjoy, so take the opportunity to find out a bit about why that might be.

Discourage walking around the house during designated learning time. Children are good procrastinators and might want to wander off for food or a drink! This is one reason why breakfast and snacks during break times are important.

Teachers are still available to help in certain ways. Your respective schools should let you know how this is possible. This is important because if your children have questions you can’t answer, encourage them to make a note of it and contact the teacher. It’s this sort of situation that can lead to tension and disagreement.

Your home life demands may not necessarily lend to a routine that replicates the school timetable. Clearly there may be the need for children in your home to help out with the care of younger or older relatives, muck in with the chores or other things that interrupt a regular learning pattern. Consider a logging system where your children record the amount of time spent learning in the day, if they work better in the evenings (and you are happy they can prove this to you!) and this is a scenario that works well within your home then this seems a reasonable solution.

While not an easy situation, this is an opportunity to spend quality family time together, and learn about the things your children enjoy and don’t like so much. If you feel they’re not in the mood or are unresponsive to the learning you’ve set up, try and remind them of the importance of keeping their mind engaged and ticking over in their various subjects. Some learning is better than none.

Take the opportunity to show your children (age dependant) how to do a few household chores! Let them help out with cleaning clothes, cleaning parts of the home and other simple DIY jobs! If the weather begins to pick up, show them how to care for a garden or pot plants if you have outdoor space or a windowsill.

If you’re working from home, show your children what you do! It’s an opportunity for them to see how what they’re doing in school now translates into the future! If you feel it’s appropriate (and can show them in a positive way that doesn’t turn into a scary lecture!) show them some of the things you need to do to keep a house financially stable, like paying bills, savings accounts and income.

As I mentioned, I believe the most important thing here is to maintain healthy relationships within your home. If the pressure starts to build and children are resisting to the point of serious disagreement, then take some time out and build things up gradually, repairing the situation gradually, before trying the steps above again.

As parents we are the primary educators and carers of our children. You know them well, so please start this process with lots of confidence, you can do this!

We obviously don’t know at this stage how long this will go on for, but good luck and I hope some of the above is useful.

Here's a suggested timetable for this period, but please refer to the points above, this is purely a guide and you may feel amending it slightly would be preferential for your particular household. It is based on 5 lessons a day. If your children have different instructions from their school, please amend, but try and incorporate the breaks at a similar rate of interval

8.00

Wake up and begin morning routine

9.00 - 9.40

Lesson 1

9.40 - 10.00

Break (possibly a drink, snack, walk about, stretch)

10.00 - 11.30

Lesson 2 & 3 (A small break and stretch of the legs in between subjects)

11.30 - 13.00

Lunch, social time.

13.00 - 13.40

Lesson 4