Agile for homework
2020 seems a challenging year. All of a sudden covid pandemic changed our lives, giving us even more challenge. We had to get used to new lifestyles too. Be in the home for more than 2–3 months, work from home, survive with the things we have were some of the challenges we overcame.
Not only adults, our kids also facing new challenges these days. Now they have to learn from home, which is pretty much new to Sri Lankan students. The challenge here is they have to engage with their online lessons, complete notes, do the exercises and study alone.
As working parents this is a big challenge for us as both of us have to work during the day time and don’t get much time to check our daughter’s work. She has her online lessons for about 2.5 hrs. per day and get homework and notes through school LMS. For a week she gets homework for about ten subjects.
My daughter worked according to a timetable but I saw she was struggling to manage her work and most of the time failed to complete tasks for the week. Sometimes she missed some work from the previous week and tend to totally forget it and continued with the next. My 9 year’s old little kid kept busy telling “I have to complete that”, “Oh, I have forgotten to do that “and “I’m tired“. I saw gradually she is missing her most favorite hobby, reading books as she is always wondering how to complete her homework. This opened my eyes. I felt I must do something so that she can manage her work and enjoy the day.
Then I taught her how to plan and organize her work in agile manner. Not in a bigger scale, but with the words that she can understand. I taught her how to make a list of things that she need to complete. She was excited to do it when I gave her some sticky notes. Then we drew a planning board with columns to-do, In-progress and done. In the morning she plans her work for the day and moves sticky notes to the top of “to-do” list and mark them with a red pen. When she starts the task she moves the sticky note to in-progress. Once she completes a task I gave her a happy face and for every 10th happy face we celebrated it with a food she likes the most or a movie. Also, I taught her a little bit about the ‘definition of done’ as well. Now she arranges her table and clean the surrounding when complete the work.
Believe me, She is enjoying moving the tasks to done and completes her lessons on time. She is excited to get 10 happy faces. I too happy that she get much time to play and read books.
