Adventures in E-learning
Magnus is in kindergarten this year, our first child to enter real school, and of course because of COVID-19, his kindergarten start is looking a lot different than we imagined it would. Because of my risk profile due to asthma, we made the difficult decision to enroll Magnus in 100% e-learning. We are very lucky to live in a well-resourced school district who already had an online school they could expand and leverage for the unique needs of this year.
That said, even with a district with experience in remote learning outside of COVID, enrollment exploded for the school from approximately 150 students last year, to more than 2500 students this year! Naturally the massive swell of online learners caused some growing pains. The district delayed our start date for the school year for a week to make new COIVD plans, and then school opted to introduce a “soft-start” where for the first two weeks of the school year instead of working in the portal (Connexus) we were given “choice boards” to do an activity or two per day.
At the time of our “soft-start” Magnus had been out of formal instruction for almost six months. Before COVID hit, Magnus was killing it academically in Pre-K despite being the youngest boy in his class, but if I’m honest, we didn’t make learning a priority in early stay-at-home days. Like many people, we thought this was a short-to-medium term problem and we focused on keeping the kids alive, safe, and relatively happy as we juggled working from home with kids home and TP shortages and terrifying news reports. Unlimited screen-time? Sure!
Where we had any bandwidth to add teaching to our schedule, we focused on some enrichment/entertainment activities during survival mode like face-painting, homemade puppet shows, science projects and craft kits, etc. As days turned to weeks and then months, we layered in a program that Magnus’s pre-K teacher has recommended call 4 Weeks to Read by Learning Dynamics (click here for 10% off your order) This program was really beneficial to Magnus as an emerging reader. But as Spring turned to Summer and we got closer to a DITY cross-country move, we fell back into survival mode. Magnus definitely experienced some learning-loss in his time out of school, and even more impactful, he got out of the habit of learning expectations. This made our soft-start rough!
It was like pulling teeth to get Magnus to sit down and focus on any of the short assignments, even where he had lots of support, freedom to choose activities, physical activity, etc. Trying to force-march him through the minimum requirements after a long day of work was painful. At many points during the first week of school I thought we’d made a huge mistake and we’d have to risk sending Magnus back to in-person school ASAP.
It went from bad to worse when we moved from choice boards, to practice programming in the online learning portal. There was yelling, and tears, and hours of frustration from both Magnus and I. So I went to my community for help. In these socially distanced times, that meant I took it to Facebook. I wanted to understand if other parents were dealing with bright, curious kids HATING school. And my community came through with the reassurance I needed, most of my friends with experience in teaching or in e-learning with young kids confirmed that this was widespread. It helped me step back and adjust my expectations.
The common advice was:
Give grace to yourself and your child
Get them offline for learning as much as you can
Provide choices wherever possible
Leverage existing interest areas
Take frequent breaks, 5 year olds have short attention spans
Get those wiggles out
Around the same time, a light bulb seemed to go off for Magnus, parts of this e-learning were fun! He also seemed to settle-in and accept that the expectation to engage in e-learning wouldn’t go away even under protest.
We’re grateful that in addition to the computer-based learning our school allows us to count reading time, PE activities, family activities, etc toward his education time requirements and we are maximizing our fun that way.
Things are going much better, but there are still good and bad e-learning days. That’s okay! We’ll try to keep you posted on how the adventure continues!
Below are some links to a few of the things we’ve found helpful on our e-learning adventure like our favorite art kit, the felted wool balls we use for math manipulations, our favorite reading program, the getting ready for Kindergarten workbook we used, and the science kit our dear friends gifted us that brought the fun back!
Are you an e-learning guide this fall? How’s it going for the kiddos in your life? Please comment to share your experience or anything that’s helped your family along the way!
