Keeping Skills Sharp at Home

At Lincoln, we enjoy the occasional lazy snow day off as much as the next person. However, when school closures last at least a few weeks, a more structured schedule is necessary. We’re here to help you craft a meaningful schedule for your impromptu homeschooling.

Start by breaking the day into 30-minute or 60-minute increments. Ask your children for input regarding what activities they’d like to do at various times of day. Chances are, they’ll want to stick close to what they do in their classrooms, with certain subjects at certain times of the day.

Remember, sometimes less is more. Reach for a few meaningful activities to hit the key academic areas and mix them into free play to ensure a well-balanced day. A sample homeschool day follows:

Morning:

After eating a healthy breakfast and getting dressed for the day, start with some reading and writing.

Reading

This does not necessarily mean kids are sitting on the couch curled up with a book. Plenty of active options are beneficial for building literacy skills, as follows:

Play a game of Memory. Create your own cards with sight words or even vocabulary terms and definitions.

Use Nerf guns combined with sight words to create a game. Write sight words on a window or sliding glass door. Have your children “shoot” at a word and then read it.

Look online or at your local library for audio books or Vox books that will read to your children.

Mix it up online. Check out resources such as Scholastic. They are offering 30 days of material for various grade levels. A day can consist of a themed audio book, a video, and an offline activity

Writing

Provide a question or prompt about which students can journal.

Get creative and instead ask your children to create a comic book.

For children missing their friends, encourage them to be pen pals and exchange letters with their friends via email.

Midday

Remember, there is a lot of value in free play during the day. Send your children outside to ride a bike or take a walk. On a rainy day, do some yoga, build with Legos, or pull out the crafting supplies. Don’t forget a yummy lunch to keep their brains and bodies fueled with energy.

Afternoon

Math

Play a board game with younger kids, encouraging them to practice counting spaces.

Get your children to help in the kitchen. Cooking a meal can incorporate practice with fraction operations.

Bring some active components to math fluency practice by using a site such as Fluency and Fitness.

Mix it up online. Use Xtra Math as a quick way to work in some daily math fact practice.

Working together with children to craft a schedule such as this one will help them have a smooth transition and keep their skills sharp. It allows plenty of time for play and encourages kids to take the reins in terms of choosing academic activities in which they’re interested.

Ryan Jackson recently joined the Lincoln Learning Solutions team as a mathematics teacher. She has more than 8 years of experience in online education. Ryan spends her free time traveling across the U.S. with her husband and two children.