I recently asked the parents in my mailing list what their experiences of Lockdown 3.0 were and if they could share some tips. I hope that you will find this article useful.

Here in the UK we are in the second week of the National Lockdown in 2021. Children are undergoing remote learning away from school and parents are managing the process.

In this article, I share some comments that include tips on how to manage remote learning within the family home.

Whilst I have permission to share the following information, I am going to change the names of the contributors to this article.

8 Resolutions For Remote Learning by Sarah.

Sarah is supporting her 10 year old son as he undergoes remote learning. She very kindly shared ‘8 resolutions’ for supporting his learning process.

1. I am not keeping the school time table because he can’t. We will be behind and we will not care
2. I have three hours to give him every day and I am going to turn everything into a multi-sensory, tangible experience.
3. I am going to praise him, reward him and cover him and his door in stickers for every minute of effort he gives me.
4. I am going to listen to him read, act and draw all the characters from the English text (and I am going to download it from audible).
5. I am going to ask him to TELL me what he thinks while we are walking and either type it or record it for the teacher.
6. I am going to wring every penny I have spare into the amazing Judy Brice, the specialist dyscalculia teacher I found.
7. I am going to use Pinterest for science, art and DT ideas because that is his strength and I will make it stronger
8. I will wear Kevlar and ear defenders when other parents tell me the school has done a marvellous job (for their neuro typical treasures) and the staff tell me that I have not done enough.

My son is amazing, when the storm ends and the rains stop he will be refreshed and brilliant.

I really like the positivity and determination in the tone of these tips. If a child is struggling generally with whatever level of support the school has historically given then the parent clearly has an opportunity during Lockdown 3.0 to really change the tone of the way that the child learns. What is great here is the way that Sarah is literally taking away the stress of learning up front. If they get behind then there is no stress, it is what it is. How empowering must that be for the son? There is a good use of resources being indicated e.g Pinterest which is a very visual based platform for getting together ideas.

What I am doing with Remote Learning by Rose, mother of an 11 year old son.

Rose got in touch to share her thoughts about remote learning.

“Dear John

My son is in Y7, he is finding the Oaka KS3 study packs and online resources very helpful for doing his remote learning. I like them in particular because of the paper format, it is very engaging and easy to digest. The problem with remote learning is that there is too much screen time, especially for a student who is easily over stimulated and easily distracted by Google (often the instructions are to Google the answer, requiring an ability to scan pages of dense text) and therefore overwhelmed by it all. This means I have to sit next to him a lot: if he attempted to do the work unaided it would never end. My 7 year old is left to his own devices.

I take him out to a park of his choice for 1-2 hours a day and let him fidget as much as he wants when he is studying as without the sensory stimulation and exercise he cannot think.

I am trying to praise his efforts as much as possible, especially when he is working independently. I let him watch TV as a reward at the end of the day.

I am trying to see this as an opportunity for me to see how he is doing with secondary school and how he learns best. If he were at school I wouldn't know much. Today, for example, I realised that if he can visualise something it is best: he was doing popes in History and I showed him a painting of a pope. That was a great starting point. Then he had Breathing in Biology, I got out a “lift the flap, see inside your body book” and he just ate up the images and opening and closing the windows. Oaka's online resources have 3D models which you can manipulate, he loves those.

Happy New Year and many thanks for all the emails and amazing work.

Best wishes
Rose “

Again lots of praise for effort being shown here. I especially like the allowance of fidgeting so as to maintain focus as well as having time out for exercise in the park.

Rose makes an interesting point about screen time so using non screen activities will break up the day nicely and will appeal to the creative strengths of the dyslexic learner. In these comments we see the use of books that are interactive (lifting flaps).

Help learning to not feel like being taught!

A grandparent got in touch about lock down earlier in the year. Diane is a retired teacher. She said the following:

“I was with my grandkids. They have never known me as a teacher as I am retired. I spent 15 years as a SpLD dyslexia tutor. I was impressed how the kids , 8 and 10, both girls and dyslexic, used the calendar to know how many days I was there. I was sleeping in one of the girls bedrooms. I was impressed that when wanting to make a point about little sisters lack of help one drew a circle ,pie graph, to show little sister her lack of help. Dad does 60per cent etc. They often said they hate maths. Like many dyslexics they knew the answer, or used ‘nature's abacus’, their fingers for counting. I wrote down a story about the day dad made bread, he's a chef, only to have the yeasty mixture to bubble over the top to cries of the bread's exploding! I got them to read it to me. They told me I'm not a REAL teacher!”

This reminds me of Lois Letchford and her book ‘Reversed’ about how she taught her ‘unteachable’ son at home by making learning fun aka using a range of different and fun ways of embedding the learning. In Diane’s example, she was able to use the maths about topics taking place in the home or using literacy by writing about funny family based events. Lockdown is perhaps an opportunity to allow the child time to work out how to learn using real life examples from home. I love the way that the grandchildren told Diane that she wasn’t a real teacher. That says a lot doesn’t it?

Ms Stannards Rules.

My good friend, Steph shared this with me today and it resonates a lot with Sarah’s Resolutions.

I think that Steph’s rules just indicate how important it is to set expectations both ways in the teaching process. Steph isn’t a teacher, but the messages in these ‘rules’ are so reassuring for a child and for me I think that the important thing is that as parents we should articulate what our children should expect from us as well as what we should expect from them. Setting boundaries are important and for some children reassuring. I don’t know if Steph did this but it could be a good exercise to put this list of rules together with your child with suggestions from you and them. This would promote ownership for both parties in this remote learning process.

Please note that Steph was happy for me to share her and her son’s name.

Final Comments.

I am keen to share anything that will help parents and teachers during this difficult period. I hope that you have found these comments useful but I would equally love to hear from you if you have any thoughts.

I want to thank my contributors in this article who have shared some lovely reflections about their experiences of remote learning.

I would like to thank Kaz-Type for sponsoring this article, a touch-typing programme that can help young people to learn to touch-type in 90 minutes. My daughter found schooling so much easier because she learnt how to effectively use a keyboard on a laptop as handwriting was so tricky. Given that our children are now remote learning, they have more of an opportunity to play to their strengths and so if using a keyboard for school work is useful then this could be a great life skill to learn during this period.