Through no fault of my own (okay, there was quite a lot of fault) I am ‘blessed’ with three children, all of Primary school age. The youngest having started in Reception in September, the eldest in Year 5 and the middle one in Year 2. Now I love my children but, being a quiet and contemplative individual, they can really wind me up sometimes, and the level of noise is insane… some days they have entire conversations shouting full pelt at each other. At times they have the manners of a tribe of goats, the social etiquette and grace of a troop of chimpanzees and the personal hygiene of a drove of pigs. So, you can imagine the bliss I would enjoy, every day after returning home from dropping them off at school Monday to Friday, sitting in absolute silence in a freshly tidied living room with a cup of tea.
Now imagine that blissful image popping as I discover that, due to the global pandemic of COVID-19, the schools would be closing in three days’ time and I’d have my children at home 24/7 for the foreseeable future. On top of this, we wouldn’t be able to escape the house at the weekends as we usually did, to the park, or playground or any of the multitude of nature spots, beaches, or landmarks and engage in enriching and physically challenging activities that would both tire them out, and give my wife and I the justification to then let them stare at screens for the rest of the day whilst we get some time to ourselves to engage in our own interests and pursuits. Oh, and just to top it all off with a nice little glacé cherry, whilst they are no longer attending school, it was now up to me to continue their education.
Considering the absolute lack of preparation our delightful Prime Minister and his government left the schools, they did an amazing job of rallying round to facilitate and support our children’s continued education. Very quickly they put together lesson plans and got to grips with technology to deliver these to us, along with sharing heaps of resources already available to them for the children to keep building on what they’d already covered in school. Swifty, faced with nothing else to do, the nation’s achemics, artists, authors, creators, celebrities and professional motivators took it upon themselves to add to this already rich pool, by sharing their own particular take on educational resources. From digital and audio books, to science and history lessons, to arts and crafts tutorials, to becoming the nation’s P.E. teacher, there was suddenly a wealth of content on offer.
The first of our problems reared its ugly head swiftly, as we foolishly put in place a set of rules pertaining to our children’s home learning experience. The foremost of these was “no screens during the school day”, and we planned on continuing to adhere to the school timetable they were used to of 9am until 3pm. So it came as quite a shock to us that nearly all the content being provided by both the schools and the nation’s professional creators at large, was online or via web or video. Bugger.
After a lightning-quick about face on the whole ‘no screens’ thing, we started to check out the content on offer to us and were very quick to discover that there was already so much of it to choose from. Too much in fact. And it was being added to everyday as more and more people got involved and added their own content feeds to the ever expanding lake of learning resources. After no time at all, to my personal shame, I just stopped looking, especially when new links to things seemingly started being posted up every 5 minutes every day of the week.
And all of it, to the very molecule, sparked absolutely no enthusiasm in my children.
In that first week we tried a few different things, I printed out whole trees worth of lesson plans and activities all of which ended up untouched in the recycle bin. We tried to keep up with Joe Wicks… the kids got to about a minute in and got bored and sloped off, whilst I nearly died and could barely get up and down from the sofa for the rest of the week without moans of pain and a lot of swearing under my breath.
It turns out that, as fantastic and unbelievably generous as all this content was, the expectations were just unobtainable. You needed to be a super fit athlete to keep up with P.E. (and not an unfit sofa surfer with a desk job), and an accomplished crafter or artist to achieve the same results as those in the tutorials. Certainly not a child with very little attention span and lack of any kind of dexterity or skill, after all, this is who this was all supposed to be aimed at. That wasn’t the biggest issue however, oh no. That would be the simple fact that they just didn’t want to do anything at all!
It seems like a ridiculous thing to have aimed for now, but another rule we’d decided to put in place was that, just as they would have on a school day, they needed to get dressed and brush their teeth. When this simple task became one of the hardest things to achieve in the day, you can see how easy it was to just give up on anything else.
Whereas we would normally enforce this with a sequence of ever escalating threats to strip back privileges, the children very quickly learned that they held all the cards, and started to flatly refused to do anything we asked of them, claiming that they didn’t care about the consequences, but knowing full well that any privilege we removed would be swiftly put back in place when all the mess, and the constant top volume sonic assault got too much for us later in the day.
When we did, eventually, manage to get the kids dressed and sitting down at the table to do just the basic things they each had been set by the school, these turned out to be so wildly different that coordinating three unrelated tasks and levels of ability at the same time was just impossible. At the same time we discovered that our eldest has a pathological fear of maths and runs off in floods of tears at the simple question “what’s 6 + 9”. To make matters worse, everyday we’d see a constant stream of the exciting and wholesome activities other families were involved in, finished and thought out schoolwork posted on the school blog by other children, even tales of family movie marathons under duvets with no fighting or shouting. It made me want to cry, to scream “what are we doing wrong?!”.
Thankfully, some bright spark (a head teacher) piped up and said to the nation at large “Don’t sweat it”. I can’t tell you what a relief that was to hear.
Since then we’ve concentrated on letting them find a natural rhythm to the day, plenty of play, choosing our battles when we can. We involve them in daily activities such as cooking or building projects (the boys and I made a tree swing together), as well as encouraging plenty of reading and a bit of fresh air every other day. We try most days to stick to the “no screens until 3pm” rule, but that does slip sometimes, especially when they get shouty and fighty.
The schools have also worked out that a lot of parents have children in both key stages 1 and 2 so have got together and are setting whole school ‘topics’ so that siblings can all get involved in one activity. Not that it’s made much of an impact on us… the kids still haven’t got any interest in doing anything at all ‘school related’.
I know there are a vast, dizzying array of factors involved before this happens, and the safety of everyone involved is tantamount to these, but I can’t wait for the schools to re-open. I fear for my children’s education if not!
So if you are out there, worried about how much or how little home learning your children are doing, know that you are not alone. And if anyone has any ideas on how to get my kids interested in educating themselves, I’d love to hear them!
