Quaranteaching: Homeschool Your Kids Like a Pro During Coronavirus
By Jane Ridley
It was with much fanfare that Jenn Falik and her daughters, Alexa, 9, and Goldie, 5, opened their new school – dubbed the Fun Falik Learning Academy – out of their home Monday.
The two girls are among millions of students locked out of regular classes after the closure of schools throughout New York City and the tri-state area by authorities trying to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Scouring social media for education resources and armed with Google Classroom assignments from her daughters’ elementary school, Falik resolved to home-school as they batten down the hatches for the challenges ahead.
“I closed my eyes and had this nightmare vision of iPads hooked up to 50 different chargers and empty potato chip bags strewn all over the floor for the coming weeks,” Falik tells The Post. “We desperately needed to establish some structure and a routine.”
They started off making a special sign (complete with stickers) for their pretend educational establishment and got to work studying math, English and even geography: The girls’ dad, Brian Falik, 41, who works in finance, taught a lesson about the 50 states by going through which ones they’d visited on a map. They even took a physical-education break in the afternoon to do a cheerleading routine in the basement with mom.
“To be honest, I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing, but we muddled through,” says Falik, 41, an on-air fashion and beauty contributor from Westport, Conn. “It wound up being a fun, successful morning.”
Muddling through — at least during the early days of home education — is exactly what expert Courtney Ostaff, recommends to parents considering that option, as schools scramble to come up with online classrooms and virtual work plans.
“So many people do not start homeschooling on purpose but kind of fall into it,” says Ostaff, who has more than two decades of experience as an online educational instructor. “It’s the same for people doing it because of the coronavirus. They’re not alone and need to take a deep breath and think to themselves: ‘We’ve got this.’ ”
Ostaff, who most recently worked with the online Well-Trained Mind Academy, believes the key to stepping in as your child’s teacher is to just do it, now — don’t put it off till tomorrow.
“It’s so easy when the kids are screaming and you’ve got a work deadline or you’ve got to be some place,” she says. “You think: ‘I’ll start tomorrow’ but then you never do. My advice is to begin as soon as possible, on the first day school is out, if you can.”
Start by taking baby steps.
“On Day 1, parents should pick one subject that is important to their child — say, math — and order a textbook, such as Saxon Math. A good Saxon Math class will take you around 45 minutes to complete,” Ostaff says.
To assess kids’ educational level, students should take Saxon’s online placement test, so their parents can order the right book from Amazon.
As for English language, Ostaff recommends either the guide “Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons” for kindergarten and first grade students or “The Ordinary Parent’s Guide To Teaching Reading” for second to fourth grade.
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The mother of two, who home-schools both her kids, ages 12 and 6, also stresses the importance of carefully curated bedtime reading. She’s a fan of the award-winning D’Aulaires mythology story collections.
What about simulating that classroom experience? Do kids really need a separate learning space?
Given the confines of many New York City apartments, Ostoff says parents shouldn’t worry about it.
“All you really need is a flat surface like a kitchen or dining table,” she says. “Noise-canceling headphones are also very handy to limit distractions.”
Her general rule of thumb regarding time spent homeschooling is 15 minutes for each year of a child’s life. Therefore a 6-year-old would receive tuition for 90 minutes, while an 8-year-old would get two hours.
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“At fourth grade, we’d expect children to study for about half a [typical school] day,” she says.
For established home-schoolers like Becky O’Donnell, staying home because of the coronavirus is not a huge deal, although it has placed limits on her 9-year-olds’ extracurricular activities such as dancing and acting classes.
She has been educating kids Cassie and Jake in their Hunterdon County home in northern New Jersey since last September after becoming dissatisfied with their public school. There was a lot of trial and error when they first began but now they’ve settled into a 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. routine using resources such as National Geographic and CuriosityStream.
“Even Netflix has a ton of informational stuff which interests my children,” she says.
The fourth-graders love this new method of teaching and have flourished.
“They guide their own learning and choose to study what interests them,” adds O’Donnell. “There is no rush, and they develop in their own way in their own time.”
Her tips for those joining the home-education movement because of the coronavirus pandemic are simple: incorporate lots of breaks in the instruction; don’t make the lessons unpleasant by criticizing little mistakes like grammar and “chill out a bit.”
On a similar note, Ostaff offers reassurance to parents who might be concerned that the unscheduled break from traditional schooling will affect their children’s educational prospects in the long run.
“I would stack my (homeschooled) 12-year-old’s education up there with anybody else’s,” she concludes. “I’ve had friends here in Morgantown, West Va., who’ve had students going on to Princeton. The last time I checked into it, a couple of years ago, home-schoolers were admitted into Stanford and the Ivys at preferential rates because they are known to be able to do independent, solid work.”
Reference: NY Post