During the coronavirus pandemic, many of us have been faced with difficult challenges. There, of course, are the fears about health, but beyond that, our lifestyles have significantly changed. For parents, with schools closed likely until the fall, we’ve had to think about homeschooling.
You may also be working at home at the same time as you need to provide some level of structure and education for your kids.
How do you do both? How can you effectively tackle working at home and homeschooling? The following are tips that may be helpful.
Set Priorities
When you’re trying to tackle both work and educating your kids, you have no choice but to prioritize. You simply aren’t going to be able to do it all.
You need to prioritize what’s important to you individually and what’s important to your family.
Each week and perhaps even each morning, create a list of priorities. There are the things you must get done and then the things you’d ideally like to get done.
Set priorities for both your work and your kids.When you’re creating priorities, you want to think about timing. When is your brain best, and when are your kids most likely to be engaged with learning? You want to tackle the most challenging work and school tasks during that time.
If you’re self-employed and you work from home, you’ll likely want to put most of your attention work-wise on the things that currently make you the most money. The other things that perhaps you’d like to achieve in your career but that aren’t making money right now can wait, as we’re all facing an unprecedented situation.
Create a Schedule
Creating a schedule should be in line with your priorities, but they aren’t one and the same. Prioritize first, and then build those priorities into your schedule. Your schedule should be very specific and have chunks of time.
Write it down so that you’ll know what to expect of yourself, and your kids will also know what to expect.
When you’re scheduling, plan to do your most challenging tasks while your kids are doing more independent school activities. For example, maybe your kids watch YouTube videos while you’re doing the work requiring the most brainpower.
Set Aside Time To Work Alone
We’re all in a situation where we’re facing challenges we probably never anticipated.You will need a time when you can work alone, no matter how independently your kids work on school tasks.
Maybe this is early in the morning or perhaps it’s in the evening. You have to think about what works best for you and your family.
If you’re a morning person, you could theoretically wake up at 5 a.m. and have a few hours of uninterrupted work time while you’re kids are still asleep.
Set Aside Time for Fun or Relaxation
Homeschooling is challenging for parents and kids. You don’t want to pack so much into your daily schedule that your kids get burned out. When your kids are at school, while they’re there all day, they aren’t necessarily doing schoolwork all day. They’re in their extracurricular classes, they’re having recess, they’re having lunch, etc.
You really only need a few hours of learning time, so don’t be too hard on yourself.
Screen Time Is Fine
We’re conditioned as parents to think screen time is inherently bad, but it’s not, and if you’re working and trying to help your kids keep up with school during COVID-19, screen time is necessary.
Try to make it as educational as you can, at least during the day, but don’t feel like you’re failing if there are a lot of screens in use at your home right now.
Finally, when it comes to education right now, think outside of the box. If your school district has provided a curriculum, do what you can with that. If not, or if you can’t always stick with it, get creative and try to find time to help your kids learn but do so in an enjoyable way.
For example, maybe in the afternoons when your work is done, you spend some time outside. You can do science lessons outside, or you can have your kids write about what they see.
This is educational and can help your kids learn valuable lessons. Education doesn’t always have to be regimented and formal to be beneficial for your kids.
Cut yourself slack and do what you can, which is something many of us are having to learn right now.