Homeschooled your children during the COVID-19 lockdown? We would love to hear from you.
Homeschooling UK Survey is now open (anonymous 10-15mins)
In March when the UK government closed schools and imposed lockdown restrictions, to stem the spread of COVID-19, we all were hurled into a situation that we have never been in before. While adjusting to the life with new measures like social distancing; no pasta, rice, flour or toilet rolls on supermarket shelves; and setting up our “home offices” (wherever there was a space on a table top) – some of us who have young families, had to learn to “homeschool” our children while also doing our fulltime jobs.
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| Image by: EliasSch Pixabay |
As a mother to primary school twins, I can tell you how amazing, frustrating, infuriating and many other adjectives can be added to describe this experience. We started taking in a day at a time first. But soon we reduce that to an hour at a time as we realised even a day is too long time when doing juggling homeschooling with a full-time job.
In April when I was put on furlough I was worried how I would fill my days. But later when I started getting into proper homeschooling, I realised even the furlough time was not enough! My furlough time came at a crucial time as the twins were getting ready for their eleven plus (secondary school entrance tests).
One of the best things we did before the lockdown was collecting a box of hand-me-down books from a friend's place. These books were used workbooks. But I could copy questions (either by hand - yes, I copied them in my new found 'free' time - or using the until then under used home printer). These workbooks together with BBC Bitesize, IXL subscription and the work sent home by school kept us going until the summer school break.
The researcher inside me wanted to gather the experience of eLearning in challenging times and I was not alone there. I soon found collaborators in Japan, New Zealand, Egypt and Sri Lanka who wanted to do similar work and possibly draw comparisons. We wanted to do both homeschooing experience as well as the experience of higher education students – however, with the pressing needs of "Transform" project at work (where we transformed all our Autumn 2020 offering) I was only able to progress on the homeschooling study.
So far, we have launched two surveys:
The survey is designed as an anonymous survey and to take no more than 10-15 mins of time. We hope to gather homeschooling experiences from parents and caregivers of young people.
If you have homeschooled a young person during the school closure period due to COVID-19 pandemic and you are a resident of UK (or Sri Lanka) please can you participate in our survey please?
