Regina family offers advice on teaching kids at home

Bells are ringing to empty classrooms and playgrounds Friday as Saskatchewan schools close indefinitely while kids and parents face a sudden new reality of educating from home.

Jenn Dean with FamiliesMatterMost.com started homeschooling her three teenage boys when they were in elementary school. She gets the stress many families may be facing right now and as a family coach, she recommends taking the first two weeks to rest and reconnect instead of trying to enforce an academic schedule right away.

“Right now it feels stressful, it feels horrible, you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re thinking, ‘This is a horrible, horrible idea,’ but it will get better (and) you will find your rhythm. Just lower the bar and enjoy those babies,” Dean said.

She likens this scenario to the first day of camping when you’re trying to set up, nothing seems to be working and you feel like it was a bad idea. But it will get better.

Starting with simple routines of working together, resting together and playing together will hopefully prevent bored kids from starting trouble and might even leave families feeling more connected at the end of this pandemic.

Dean’s best advice for parents suddenly thrust into homeschooling is to understand it doesn’t work to recreate a classroom and school environment for their kids. She and her kids learned that lesson a long time ago.

“In your mind you think, ‘OK, we’re going to reproduce school and you’re going to sit here from 9 until 3,’ and that tends to go terrible. It goes horrible. You try it for a few days and you give up,” Dean explained.

Her 15-year-old son Evan is used to keeping up with his schoolwork at home, but knows it won’t be easy for many of his friends.

“It is I’m sure much harder for other people who are just getting thrown into this. We’ve been accustomed to this for quite a while so it makes it easier. I feel for anyone who is going through this time. Our first days of homeschool weren’t pretty,” Evan said.

Jenn said once families are rested and ready to try more structure, aim for more productivity first thing in the morning. With her teenagers she calls it “power hour.”

“For younger kids, the first hour of your day — whatever the hardest thing for them is, if it’s math, if it’s science (or) if it’s reading — I would recommend the first learning hour of their day be their hardest thing, then build in something fun for immediately after that,” she said.

“So maybe the first hour is math and reading and then it’s time to go play outside for a while or snack time or playing with toys or maybe it’s TV or video games.”

Dean cautioned against overdoing the academic hours, saying most homeschoolers aim for two hours at most for middle-year kids and four hours with an extra hour of reading for high school. She said this is more than enough time to get lots of learning in.

“I think the key for suddenly homeschooling families is to not try and reproduce the classroom but to think, ‘OK, instead of homeschooling can I think of it as home learning?’ So I’m not trying to have school at home; I just want my kids to learn stuff,” Dean said, noting life skills can count for a lot at this time.

“What are the things I want them to learn? What are the adult skills I want them to know for their future? What are the ‘adulting things’ that they need to know? What about cleaning the house or cooking a meal or ironing a shirt? What about checking the oil in the car?”

While many of those things are skills parents always intended to teach their kids, sometimes life just gets in the way. Dean said now could be the perfect time to do them, rather than worrying about keeping the kids ahead of their grade level.

Dean added that it doesn’t matter how kids are learning as long as they’re learning something and retaining information. For her family, that means documentaries, YouTube and playing around with computer programs to create music. Even calling up relatives and asking them about historic events counts as learning.

“We can actually get outside the box and think to ourselves, ‘They just need to learn. It doesn’t matter how they learn as long as they learn,’ ” Dean said. “We don’t need to recreate a classroom. We can just have fun with it and be creative.”

Her boys are at the point where they work independently really well, and 14-year-old Ryan appreciates having more control over his learning.

“I can’t really sleep in because I have to do things in the morning, but I like how I can kind of do what I want when I want. I still have to do things but I can be like, ‘Oh, I want to do extra math today,’ and I can. And maybe the next three days I don’t do any math but if I do more on one day, I can. So I have more freedom to do what I want,” Ryan said.

Rather than the sounds of a busy hallway, echoing gym or chattering classroom, Jenn said homeschool can be peaceful, but she often hears soccer balls kicked against the closets in the basement or the boys creating music on computer programs or practising the piano.

While the Dean family already has a settled routine for home learning, they said homeschool families are struggling right now because they are used to socializing a lot through activities which have all been cancelled.