Here’s how to continue homeschooling your children during the coronavirus pandemic

On March 13, parents suddenly became teachers as students were sent home due to the new coronavirus pandemic.

With at least three more weeks to go in the school year, The Bellingham Herald spoke with two professors from the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University at a comfortable social distance over the phone. Here’s their advice on how to homeschool your children during the coronavirus crisis.

Meeting individual needs

Every student has their own comprehension level. Some students need simple instruction to complete a task, while others need additional assistance, according to Bruce Larson, a secondary education professor at WWU.

“For students who are motivated and just want to keep going,” Larson said, parents should “provide them with a vision of what the big picture is and then allow them to find opportunities to think of what resources they need.

“It’s not so much that the parents would provide the resources as much as the parents would facilitate the thinking of the student to identify what resources they want to gather.”

Larson clarified that advice is age-specific and varies from upper elementary school students to high schoolers. By a parent adopting this teaching style, they are engaging the brain and facilitating brainstorming from the child, he said.

Comprehending classwork

Subjects such as math have been taught differently in the last decades. Parents learned how to solve a simple problem when they were in school, and now don’t understand it at all, according to Stephanie Strachan, an early childhood education professor at WWU.

“Try to encourage your child to be involved in the process,” Strachan said. “I think it’s really good to model authentic inquiry and say ‘hey we don’t understand things all the time, that happens to moms and dads too.’ When we don’t know what the answer is, we’ve gotta actively pursue it.

“One way to do that might be to go online and Google (it). We can also reach out to the classroom teacher and support your child in composing a response.”

Maintaining mental health

Becoming your child’s teacher during the pandemic can be stressful for parents, Strachan said. Some parents’ mental health may be suffering as they feel they may not be doing enough for their children’s education.

Strachan encourages parents to find lessons in activities outside of the typical classroom setting.

“I keep trying to encourage parents to remember that we are living in a worldwide pandemic and there is a lot of stress going on,” Strachan said. “They can find the learning opportunities in the authentic moments throughout the day while they are just loving on their kids, adventuring outside and exploring the world around them.”

Having a daily routine or plan for the day can help.

“Every morning, one of the simple things that I have thrown out there to some of my friends, is to have your child make a checklist,” Strachan said. “What are the things that you all want to do collectively and then independently that day? That’s a good opportunity for young children to be practicing listening to their sounds and getting them on paper.

“All that work in spelling is going to transfer to their writing and their reading. But simultaneously they have a plan that they can go to and feel accomplished.”

Teaching multiple children

Many parents have multiple children in one home. If there is only one parent at home during the school day with multiple kids, it can be difficult to share your time.

Larson recommended setting up study session times daily, for example from 10 a.m. to noon, when every student at a different grade level is separated and focusing on their own school work. This is beneficial as the parent can check in on each child individually during that time to give them their full, undivided attention.

Older children can also help their parents teach younger siblings.

“We oftentimes forget about the fact that the older (children) can teach (the) younger (children),” Larson said. “In the process of an older sibling teaching a younger brother or sister the content, they actually learn the content better. And sometimes just that peer-to-peer or brother-and-sister relationship is different than the parent relationship and could actually help this child learn it better.”