With schools now closed due to the covid-19 outbreak in South Africa, we as parents can’t afford to let our children’s learning fall by the wayside.
IDEA Digital Education’s People Operations Manager, Jackie Chikambure, outlines five key steps that parents can take to ensure they provide the right resources and environment for their children to keep learning.
Ensure your home is learning-friendly
Now that children cannot be physically present in classrooms with their teachers and fellow learners, it’s critical to ensure a tech-enabled environment at home.
This will allow you and your child to take advantage of the internet to devise creative ways to get on top of the school syllabus - think access to slides from teachers, video conference study groups with other parents and learners etc. Check that your current devices or mobile phones can play videos, access a browser and that you have sufficient data.
Get to grips with the syllabus or teaching programme
Your child’s academic success is likely to depend heavily on the support you provide in lieu of day-to-day contact with teachers and instructors. It is now more important than ever to ensure you are up to speed with the syllabus and teaching programme in respect of each of your child’s subjects.
Request this information from their school, then talk to your child about what they have been told to cover. You can also download the syllabus documents from government websites in order to align your child’s learning programme to established guidelines. Your goal here is to ensure your child keeps pace with his or her peers so they’re ready to hit the ground running when it’s time to return to school.
Find resources yourself
Now that you’re aware of your child’s goals, it’s time to seek out resources to support learning from home. Luckily for you, there are so many organisations producing great digital education content that allows you to line up everything necessary to cover what you want your child to learn during this period, and to find it online. Sometimes there might be a nominal fee, sometimes it will be free.
Set a timetable for your child
One of the big advantages of your child going to school is that the learning environment is very structured. In order to ensure continuity of learning, it’s important to recreate a sense of routine.
So put in place a learning timetable every day for each of their subjects. Most importantly, don’t forget to include break time and co-curricular activities, play and exercise in the schedule.
Actively engage in your child’s learning
Finally, our children need guidance and support to make sure that self-directed learning occurs. Keep on top of what your child should be learning, where to find the resources, and project-manage their timetable. You don’t need to teach them yourselves.