How to prepare parents for home learning

With many children isolating with symptoms and Tier 3 announced in parts of the UK, remote learning is once again a hot topic among parents and teachers. Read on for our expert advice on how to support parents to adapt to home-schooling during the pandemic.

Define the scope

Clearly, we can’t expect pupils to do five to six hours work a day on their own at a screen. Without the class atmosphere, not everything on your curriculum can or will be taught remotely.

Each piece of the jigsaw makes sense to teachers. Yet parents can feel left in the dark as to how each task connects to the bigger picture.

Informing parents of the full scope of your curriculum will help them to understand the point of each lesson and adapt their child’s learning to hit wider targets and achievements.

Include hints and tips

It’s easy for teachers to offer instructions and feedback in a classroom environment. However, parents with zero teaching experience may be lost in the face of certain activities or tasks (especially if they’re already overwhelmed attempting to balance home working with remote learning).

Take it back to basics and offer tips and hints to accompany each lesson and activity. By spelling it out, you’ll support every parent to successfully navigate all of the new information with which they suddenly find themselves faced.

Establish regular communications

Whether it’s a weekly Zoom or a WhatsApp group, offer parents the opportunity to keep in touch with teachers and other parents throughout their remote learning journey.

Film short explainer videos and upload them to a platform everyone can access. This will equip parents with the tools to teach confidently and eliminate the need for guesswork, in an easily digestible format.

Make sure parents know how to contact staff on the right platforms. Check they have all the correct name spellings in case they have an issue. Also, encourage them to familiarise themselves with the learning platforms the school is using.

Touching base with parents regularly will help them to make sense of tasks, share advice and feel less isolated in the throes of home learning.

Encourage child-led learning

Many parents who home-school their children all year round love the child-led approach to education. Child-led learning allows children to choose the activity, where they do it and how long they spend on it.

And while this doesn’t follow the same structure as classroom-based learning, now is the perfect time to encourage parents to adopt this flexible approach.

Make all information and resources on your home learning curriculum readily available at all times. This will help parents spontaneously plan a lesson around their child’s interests on the day, using curriculum resources.

Child-led home learning can enable parents to set a more relaxed and less regimented attitude to remote learning, which will reduce stress and provide more enjoyment for both parent and child.

Pass on basic teaching tips

As teachers, we know long explanations can cause children to zone out. And asking “do you understand?’ rarely gets a truthful answer.

However, parents may well fall victim to these educational missteps.

So, encourage parents to model how to do a task so the child can copy. Equally, tell them to give children the opportunity to show they’ve understood rather than asking the question. Handy tips like these will lead to smoother home learning for parent and child.

Why not create a basic cheat sheet to set parents up for home-schooling success?

Get the right curriculum for home learning

We’ve been busy adapting our ‘Learning Means The World‘ curriculum so you can teach it in a home setting. LMTW@HOME is a home-learning version which all of our member schools receive as part of their membership package.

LMTW@HOME isn’t available as a standalone product, as it’s part of our global curriculum.

Click the button below to find out more about ‘Learning Means The World’ and LMTW@HOME, then get in touch to book a demo.

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