To my fellow parents of young kids:
I was reading a psychographic market segmentation white paper for an athletic apparel company, and one of the segments they identified was the Urban Male, Opportunistic Exerciser. Essentially this is someone who values exercise highly, but has a packed schedule, so he gets his workouts in whenever he can carve out a small window of time.
One thing I’ve learned from homeschooling during COVID is that you have to be an Opportunistic Educator. Rather than try to force your kid to adhere to a strict, consistent schedule of lessons, pay attention to their rhythms, energy, and receptiveness to learn. “Kids are sponges” is the cliché, but if you approach them at the wrong time, they won’t absorb anything.
Some things I’ve personally found effective:
1. Get some complicated topics across first thing in the morning, during and right after breakfast. Math, grammar, vocabulary.
2. Don’t push past their receptiveness threshold, it won’t stick anyway. If you see them totally tuning out, shift gears to a different activity or free play rather than demand continued attention. Don’t get to the point where they’re frustrated and rebellious.
3. When you’re in the car, you have a captive audience. Rather than handing them an iPad, play some riddles, word or math games.
4. Read more advanced books and stories during lunchtime. Their hands and mouths are occupied, so they cannot fidget with toys and less likely to interrupt. Also this associates the positive feelings that come with eating with the positive feelings of hearing a new story.
5. Give them lots of physical activity. More than you think they need. Make it fun, create exciting games with simple rules. Tag, dodgeball, races, challenges, obstacle courses, etc. Alternate 15–20 minute chunks of these structured activities with big doses of free play. After they’re totally exhausted from running around, give them a carb-y snack, and then they’re primed for another 20–30 minutes of deep learning.
6. Create a list of possible activities / topics for the day, and occasionally let your kids choose which one they’d rather do. Giving them agency will make them much more excited to learn about the thing they themselves chose.
7. Be greedy with your kid’s time. Guard it fiercely. Your kid has a finite pie of attention for the day. So take a good, hard look at what your school is actually doing during their Zoom sessions. Are they constructive? Or are your kids just sitting in front of a screen for the sake of “class time”? Just b/c they are on Zoom with their teacher, doesn’t mean they’re learning anything. Maybe that time could be better spent with you, or with a tutor, or tuning into a different online resource, or drawing, or just playing.
Good luck and much love to all my fellow parents. We got this.
