This week, San Antonio Charter Moms published a guest post by Kristen Henry, an independent educational consultant, on “Big Goals, Relevant Work, and Flexibility: How to Make At-Home Learning Work for You.”
Kristen has been training teachers via Zoom the past few days, but she had time to visit Charter Moms Chats to talk about her post. She understands how hard the transition to at-home learning has been on students, parents, and teachers alike, but she sees opportunities as well. We can step away from bell schedules and daily standards and think about big goals. If your child falls in love with a book and wants to read all day, that’s OK—we have that flexibility now.
Kristen suggested ways to get kids talking about books—like bringing the family together and having everyone share what they are reading and what they like about it. Kids will naturally have questions about what is going on in the world: if they ask about the long lines at San Antonio Food Bank, that’s an opportunity for them to do some research and have a family discussion or presentation. We talked about kids finding authors and book series they love—like Nancy Drew, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson, C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.
As your family makes at-home learning work for you, how are you finding relevance? Exercising creativity and flexibility?
