Home Schooling For Dummies*: Home School Lite

*Me, the parent, not the kid

The Easter holidays are over so we're back to home-schooling. The first two weeks were a bit stressful because it was new and neither parent or child had a clue how it was going to work, and then the novelty quickly wore off. 

We received a newsletter from the school at the beginning of the week, part of which says 'we do not expect parents to "teach" their children lessons but will give ideas and links to resources and activities which will help your child gain an understanding of some of the learning they are missing' and 'please don't worry about your child "falling behind" - it is the same for everybody', which was reassuring and made me less anxious about trying to cram too much into Isobel's timetable.

So we have a new timetable now. She has reading and maths tasks every day, plus any Live Classrooms her school set, and some writing, spellings and art throughout the week. This week, the BBC have put out a daily Bitesize program on iPlayer and the red button, and there's loads of content on the website too. We've also been making the most of the sunny weather this week by getting out into the garden to do some basketball drills we found on YouTube.

The week has gone well. Tweaking the timetable has definitely helped to keep the house a bit less anxious. I've even been able to start writing a new book this week and it's felt great to get some kind of normality back!