Children learning during the quarantine? It is tricky.
As parents, the quarantine has thrown us into this unimaginable situation in which we find ourselves responsible for all our children’s learning.
Where do we begin? How do we approach this?
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the children knew themselves?
They woke up every day in the morning, made plans for their day and hit their learning goals – making tremendous progress at it?
All this without the parent’s intervention or the school trying to educate via zoom calls?
Sounds incredible?
But then, that is what we have been experiencing first hand for the past three months now.
We pulled our 6yo daughter from her Montessori school when COVID was picking up, and since then, we have made a contract with her.
The contract with her is that she is master of her day. But, she has to work on her reading & math at the same time. She has no time table and has the freedom to do whatever she wants as long as she meets her goals.
She gets 30m of iPad time by default, and if she completes her goals, she gets 1h additional as a reward. Sundays are free.
Over the past three months, she has wrapped up her Grade 1 English (reading) & math curriculum and is mid-way at doing grade 2 material.
We recently tweaked her goals so that she does a little less of her Math & English – but will read 1 book/day.
Of course, these things did not happen overnight, and we had a few things that we had put in place some time ago.
We tried a bunch of things. Some worked. Some didn’t.
The max we spend daily on her entire learning is not more than 10m on average – looking over while she is reading – to correct her and help her with new words.
And maybe 5m to look at her progress — but otherwise, it is quite a hands-off thing.
The results prove that this model works — but they are not the important bit. This will be different for different children and their families.
What is important, however, is the process. And how we can get there. (Results will take care of themselves).
Recording of a previous session
We managed to record a session we did for the Remote Indian community which is available on YouTube.
The first 30m is my presentation followed by 30m of QnA.
Future Sessions
If you would like to know more, we are hosting a 30m session this Tuesday and Thursday from 5 pm to 5:30 pm and then on Saturday from 10 to 10:30 am(These sessions are over. If you would like to be notified about future sessions, please fill-up the form below).
We want to share what we have tried and what has worked well for us — and we would like to exchange ideas if something has worked well for you too.
What you can expect to get out of this session:
- How to start on a path of learner-driven learning in your own home.
- What pitfalls to expect and what foundations you would need to put in place?
- Tools, apps and games that we tried along the way and what kind of success we had with these.
- What kind of learning apps & games to avoid and watch out for
- How to test and assess self-learning tools so as not to get false positives.
If you are interested, register here (for future sessions):
