RESOURCES FOR PARENTING DURING COVID-19

These are strange and surreal times. At this time, over 300 million children worldwide are being homeschooled. Overnight, homeschool has gone mainstream. Parents and students who have not been homeschooling may find themselves unprepared for this change. Fortunately, we live in the world of online learning where access to online resources and digital tools is more feasible and sophisticated than ever.

Creating a general schedule for your day can really help. Recently, I shared a suggested schedule (more for younger students) to help parents who have found themselves unexpected homeschoolers. Please remember that it is a only an ideal schedule for an ideal day in the life of a homeschooler, which (1) rarely happens and (2) certainly isn’t happening now. If you have a schedule, then the resources below can help you fill some of the academic time in your schedule in creative ways.

The sky is the limit. . . well, unless, it involves you going into a public place and then that’s actually the limit now. Seriously though, this could be an opportunity to do learning in an entirely different way, and may give your child and you the boost you’ve been needing in their academic life.

• If your high schooler is studying the Civil War, then after they’ve done some of their homework or studying for school, they could just watch the award-winning Ken Burn’s series Civil War. You could break from that and walk the dog outside.

• If your K – 3 child is struggling with reading, then this could be a great time to work on decoding and reading comprehension using the incredible resources recently provided by Scholastic (K – 12), choose some fun Reader’s Theater scripts to read with your child, or ask your young child to read a new book to the dog. Then, you can go take a walk and play Legos!

Below is a wide variety of resources for kids elementary school age through high school that I will be updating throughout our mass social distancing experiment. Topics include resources on academic subjects and life skills.

The point of this list is to include all of these resources in one place, and that’s it. Remember that when it comes to educating at home, in general, and especially during a pandemic, less is more – more is probably just going to lead to overwhelm.