Homeschool vs. Virtual
I keep thinking about Little House on the Prairie (books and TV show - I was a big fan!). Ma and Pa did everything for their children. They had to. Especially in the (non-fiction) books, the members of the family were often out on the prairie by themselves, miles away from civilization, depending only on each other to stay alive, get educated, and learn how to live.
Parents are being asked to suddenly go back to a model closer to the Ingalls family. We must make more decisions for our children’s well-being than before, because we are more isolated than before. Many families are choosing to stay mostly at home, which may divide teachers’ attention between in-person students and virtual ones. Some families are homeschooling. Some families are choosing to go to school, but there is less socializing and fewer families hanging out, which lessens the number of families to be our “village” in raising our kids.
Many parents are addressing their children’s educational needs through homeschooling or virtual schooling. Though they may seem similar, they are in fact very, very different. I know that to parents who have not had to supervise their children’s work before, Virtual School feels like what “Homeschooling” sounds like. And I know if you are homeschooling, it must sound no harder than supervising Virtual School. However, these two things ARE very different and need to be addressed in very different ways.
Being in charge of your child’s Virtual School has some main tasks:
Make sure your child understands the day’s lesson
Ensure that your child completes schoolwork
Follow up with them that they finished the homework
Let the teacher know when your child remains confused after a lesson
Find a quiet place with few distractions for them to work
Easier said than done, I know. I would highly recommend investing in a headset so that your child can hear the teacher, and have a microphone in front of his/her mouth. Please be aware - these microphones are very sensitive and the teacher (and class) can hear you from across the room, loud and clear. :-)
Being in charge of Homeschooling your child, you have different tasks:
Find an established curriculum that you feel you can teach
Make sure the curriculum includes Language, Math, Science, and Social Studies
Understand basic teaching techniques and how to recognize learning difficulties in your child
Set up a schedule that allows you to evaluate if your child is meeting standards for education
Find out the state standards for homeschool evaluation so that if your child returns to school at some point, they are not behind
Don’t skip a subject no matter how your child feels about it
If you are a homeschooling parent, one of the first things to know is that teaching is some instruction + lots of review. Over and over and over. For example, in math, the method is NOT to teach addition until they get it, move to subtraction, then a few days later multiplication, and next week division. We spend tons of time in kindergarten making sure children understand patterns. If you can’t do patterns, math is excruciatingly hard. In first grade, we do concentrate on adding and subtracting, but also measuring, time, money, logic, reading charts and graphs, tally marks, months and years, fact families, and much more. All of these things are taught, then reviewed. The next year in 2nd grade? Taught again, reviewed again.
We all follow a sequence.
This is why it is so important to follow a curriculum. Often, when homeschooled children transfer into school, they are missing some of these key elements of learning and have to go into remedial math, even though their calculation skills may be sharp.
Language content is similar. Even if your child is a good reader, are they also good at comprehension and inferencing? Can they navigate a table of contents, an outline, and a list of questions with spaces to write the answers? How are they on phonics - have they only learned to recognize whole words or can they also sound out new words and names? None of this is very hard to teach - you can do it! - but it’s hard to remember it all unless you are following some curriculum guidelines.
Homeschooling and Virtual Learning are quite different. Homeschooling parents need to make sure that they are following a sequence of education that will make sense as the years go by. Parents supervising Zoom school are responsible for making sure their children are able to follow the teacher during class and afterwards.
Back to the prairie
We, as parents, are no less responsible for our children. We *ARE* Ma and Pa Ingalls. Today this is true more than ever, when we can’t rely on schools to socialize, civilize, and rear our children for 6-10 hours a day. It is more than parents have been asked to do for awhile, but it is not wrong. Our kids are depending on us to help them get through this difficult time and of course, school is just part of it.
Whether your child is attending in-person, going virtually, or being homeschooled, our main focus this year must be keeping them from getting too stressed out, from swallowing too much of our adult anxiety. They deserve a childhood, full of play and fun and laughter. Does this put extra strain on us? Yep. But we are as tough as Ma and Pa Ingalls. We can do it.
Amy Richter
