A Parents Guide to Teaching In Crisis (E-learning tips & Tricks)

A Parent's Guide to Teaching in Crisis

Nobody was prepared for COVID-19 and the ways in which it would disrupt our lives. However, we can all work together to make things easier on ourselves and our kids while they’re stuck at home. Maybe they’re spending their free FaceTiming with their friends, playing video games or doing everything they can to drive you up a wall. Today, I want to help you a bit in managing their relationships and reactions in the midst of a crisis.

Step 1: Come up with a Schedule

Schedules can be difficult when parents have so much on their plates already and change is always difficult. In my case, I’m the last person my daughter wants to learn from due to the fact that I’m often as impatient as my child is. We decided very quickly that perhaps I was not the best person to be holding her accountable. 

This is where my partner’s partner came into play as well as a few of my friends. Each of them committed to having a once a week 30 minute call with my daughter and to hold her accountable for various subjects and assignments. This gives her the structure she needs without having to deal with me as much. 

Just remember that the kids will want to take frequent breaks and you don’t want to overwhelm them or drive them into resenting you so having a more free form schedule might work better for some kids while a more rigid schedule could work better for others. Sometimes, setting deadlines is the only way to ensure that they get things done in a timely manner. Test out different types of scheduling and figure out which one works best for your child. Most importantly, keep track of their emotional state in the process and write it down. It’s easy to blame mood swings but these are usually caused by an underlying issue that our children aren’t prepared to elaborate on or explain to us. I’m in my 30’s and have a hard time articulating what I’m feeling at times so I can’t exactly expect my 10-year-old to verbalize her frustrations.

Step 2: Explore the Programs Available 

There are many resources available to parents looking to teach from home but not all of these work for all kids. Some kids may be kinetic learners who need to be hands on to learn while others may be perfectly happy with their nose in a book for most of the day. The facts are that every kid is different and this means that trial and error is going to be your best friend in figuring out what works best for your kids and your family. 

Education.com

$8 a month or $120 lifetime

Worksheets can be downloaded here by grade. There are awesome writing prompts. 

Epic Books!

$8 a month

Epic Books is a great way to introduce your kid to educational books that keep them engaged. My daughter LOVES comics and rarely wants to read simple text books. I personally believe this is because much like myself, she lives with aphantasia so she doesn’t have pictures in her head and can’t picture what she’s reading. This lead to many frustrations between the two of us until we got to the bottom of it. Graphic novels have been a HUGE help in getting her excited to read again.

Storium.com

Free through June 2020

Storium and its educational counterpart StoriumEdu are narrative teaching tools designed to make the material normally covered in an English course more participatory for students. The base platform, Storium, is a fully-fledged suite for playing Play-by-Post RPGs (think forum games of old). It includes pre-built worlds by a wide range of fantasy, science fiction, and horror authors, as well as tools to construct your own such as scene cards, rotational GMing, and many others. But where Storium really shines for parents is their educational module, StoriumEdu. Originally geared more towards educators, they have steadily built in functions for parents over the past few years. Like the base platform, StoriumEdu includes pre-built modules, but these now come with a wide range of grade-based variants so you can immediately tailor the stories to your children. These are further organized by subject matter, so you can teach anything from the history of Feudal Japan to the events of the Civil War to how Young Adult Fiction works as a participatory, narrative-based course rather than merely drilling facts into your children. Furthermore, you can build your own narrative education modules based on whatever subject matter you feel is important for your child to learn (and then share them with the wider community so they can use them).

Typing Club

Typing Club is a great way for your kid to learn how to type and have a great time doing it. I found the best way to get my daughter engaged in this was to challenge her to a typing contest! This kept her engaged and the lessons are quick and easy. 

Museum Virtual Tours 

Museum virtual tours. These are run by Google and provide 3D virtual tours of famous museums around the work. These include a lot of famous works that can provide an educational experience with your participation.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a great way to keep your kid entertained and engaged in their learning because they can choose what they want to learn, you simply choose what they have access to. The downfall? The audio and the videos aren’t very high quality but it’s free right now so I can’t complain too much. 

IXL 

IXL is a fantastic program especially for families who need a little extra help with their students. You can create custom learning aimed at your students current proficiency levels and most of their learning plans meet state regulations for learning. You’re then able to set up a personalized action plan for growth and pinpoint the diagnostic levels for your kids and then monitor their progress. 

Newsela

Free for the rest of the year

Whether you and your students are together or apart, the right content resource keeps learning going. Newsela provides schools with up-to-date, accessible content that supports every learner in the classroom and at home. As a bonus, this program is free until the end of the year to teachers.

Listenwise

Free for 90 days

Listen wise offers thousands of 3-6 minute stories for children grades 2-12. These bite sized stories will help keep your children and students engaged in the learning process. These stories cover current events, science, social studies and English Language Arts. This is free to teachers during the COVID-19 school closures. 

The Kid Should See This 

For most parents, video learning is the way to go but the YouTube algorithm isn’t exactly trust worthy given that it recommends videos based on your past views and not everything your kid is watching online is educational. This website is less so an educational program and more of a website you can feel safe about your kids exploring due to the careful curation of smart videos for curious minds of all ages!

DIY.org

If your kid a hands on kid? Mine certainly is. On DIY.org your kid can earn badges while they learn new skills by taking the wheel and doing hands on activities! Imagine if Netflix made kids smarter and YouTube were safer. That’s what this is. You can try it for free for 14 days and that includes up to 4 kids on that membership plan. Otherwise it’s $19 a month for each kid or you can get a family plan that covers up to 4 kids for $25 a month. 

Tinybop schools 

Tinybop is a program that features interactive simulations of science subjects covering 38 curriculum-aligned STEM topics. It also provides a growing library of teaching resources — handbooks, activity ideas, lesson plans, and worksheets — to support teaching and learning. It’s normally $150 a year for upto 4 teachers and up to 30 students but right now they are offering half off and if your whole school wanted to get it, it’s only $450 a year covering up to 500 students and 100 teachers. 

Step 3: Rewarding your Kids - Don’t, well, sort of.

Rewards aren’t in and of themselves a negative. Everybody likes getting a reward, a prize, a trophy for their accomplishments. But be wary. Use them sparingly. Research indicates that the more we reward people - children and adults, both - the harder it is for them to find joy in those same tasks without rewards. What’s more, the rewards people need to keep feeling the same amount of pleasure grow over time. A quarter works for a 3-year-old who loses a tooth but it doesn’t work when you’re 30.

Instead, focus on integrating the reward into the task itself. Reinforce that the learning exercise is itself a pleasurable act, that getting to learn is the fun of learning. There are many ways to go about doing so. For example, a reading assignment shouldn’t end with a quiz. That’s a stressor for most people. Instead, make it participatory. Do the same reading you’ve assigned to your child. When they’re finished, do a mini book club with them. Focus on what they liked, what they didn’t like, and how they would change the story to better fit their tastes. Construct a new and improved version of the story with them to show how deep reading and good writing are connected. 

For math assignments, ground them in things your character already cares about. Do they like playing Dungeons & Dragons? Well, build a Level 20 character. The amount of arithmetic practice is easily comparable to most middle-school assignments. Have they gotten to geometry and trigonometry? You can always work with them to make a small abstract game that incorporates those concepts. It may front load additional work on you as the educator, but it will pay dividends when your child wants to engage with the material rather than forcing you to drag them through it.

I’ve even put together a list of games available on Amazon* that you can order that help teach kids varying subjects and if you look in the comments I even put recommended ages and the subjects that will be covered. Yes, I have played all of these games and can recommend them whole heartedly!

Contributors,

Joe DeSimone, Robin Zanoni, Eric Hayes-Bouyouris, Ella Galang Ampongan, Brittanie Boe

*Affiliate link