Ways to Keep Your Child Academically Engaged
Overview
Every family has been pondering how they will keep their children occupied at home for a week or more—without access to museums, amusement parks, play spaces, and play dates—since the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19, a pandemic.
Therefore, advice on how to maintain organization and effectively plan activities to keep kids engaged, happy, and academically challenged while they are not in school should be given to all teachers and parents of homeschooled children.
1. Think of a strategy.
Before spending significant time at home, you should have a plan, advises Jessica Kopp, a mother of two and a fourth-grade teacher in Los Angeles. She recommends creating a daily schedule to post on the wall for the children to see. To keep kids on track with routine and prevent them from engaging in excessive screen time, she says there should be some sort of schedule similar to what is in place at school.
The kids shouldn’t wish for a pandemic the way we hoped for snow days as kids; instead, we want them to learn and have structure. Kopp suggests using Confessions of a Homeschooler as inspiration for this schedule. It lays out the entire day to keep you organized with learning and to keep kids on task. She claims that structure is necessary for children and will make the day go by more quickly.
2. Offer options.
Being the parent and the teacher at all times, every day of the week is a surefire way to get pushback from your kids. Making choice boards for students is something Kristyn Tyler Hall, a mother of two and a facilitator of digital learning and teaching in Onslow County, North Carolina, advises.
Choice boards provide options for tasks related to a subject or can be used for free-time activities to help your children become more independent in their decision-making, giving you a brief respite when you’re cooped up together for days.
Choice boards explain them. “Choice boards can concentrate on a single content area, or each square can focus on a different content area. According to Hall, students can choose the order in which they complete activities, but they must be finished within a specified time frame.
She claims that you can easily search for and print out examples of choice boards on the internet based on the topic you want to concentrate on. Before reinventing the wheel, she advises conducting an internet search for choice boards that suit your needs.
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3. Make up a narrative.
We can all recall watching slide shows of family vacations. Suzanne Melo Udell, a mother of two and a 4th-grade teacher in Lexington, Massachusetts, suggests kids make a Google slideshow to create at home and share with classmates and friends. Children of all ages can engage in this activity to develop their narrative storytelling abilities while maintaining relationships with their friends and classmates outside of the classroom.
4. Find mathematical issues in daily life.
Elena Karas, a mother, and author from Monrovia, California, suggests having kids go around the house measuring everything in a particular size. Have them measure everything in a place that is a specific size every day of the week, such as one inch long. The following day, add an inch and instruct them to locate anything that is two inches long. Every day that they are at home, they gradually increase their size.
5. Make the world your science laboratory.
You can start an indoor or outdoor butterfly garden, depending on where you live, where you and your child can track the development from egg to butterfly. You might be able to chart a butterfly’s entire growth cycle at home because most butterflies and moths spend between five and 21 days inside their chrysalis or cocoon.
Taking care of a butterfly isn’t your thing; you could start a seed garden and watch each seed grow at home. Because they encourage a child to check in daily and teach them how to record, chart and evaluate progress, both activities are excellent for long stays at home.
You can use your kitchen as a science lab if the weather prevents you from conducting your experiments outside. Online experiments using materials like food coloring, oil, corn syrup, and dish soap are a veritable gold mine.
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6. “Spirit Day” should be observed every day.
You can create your holidays, such as “Dinosaur Day” or “Punctuation Day,” or you can model your lessons after the holidays that have already been added to the national calendar. A holiday like National Artichoke Day (March 16) might seem unremarkable in everyday life. However, celebrating something so ordinary can be accessed by learning about Greek mythology, geography, the agricultural industry, and horticulture. Search for trivia on the day’s popular topic on Google, then share what you’re learning with your children. By showing your children that you are constantly learning new things, you can cultivate a lifelong love of learning and help them develop a fresh perspective on the world.
