Tag: home education resources uk

Categories
Home Education

How Long is a Home Education Lesson?

Wooden Calendar

In schools, this is generally a pretty easy question to answer. Lessons are as long as the time slot provided for them. The UK’s experiment with Literacy Hour and Numeracy Hour weren’t overly successful. Schools prefer to set their own lesson times, and these range from 30 minutes to two hours. However, schools are doing something very different to what you will be doing at home!

Save Time on Admin

School lessons include a lot of administration. It takes a great deal longer for thirty children to get out a book and a pencil, than it does for one child to open up their Learning Box. If you keep all your supplies to hand, getting started shouldn’t take very long. In our house we keep workbooks in a filing cabinet and all stationary in a big box (if you use the Frogotter Box, of course, everything is right there inside the box ready to go).

One to One Learning is Intense

Two hours might be fine for a lesson at school, especially if that lesson is comprised of a variety of activities. It will probably be too long for a one to one lesson. Learning one to one is intense. Your child can’t let their mind wander while worksheets are being handed out, or relax while the teacher explains to children who need extra support. When they’re learning one to one, your child has your full attention all the time.

One rule of thumb is that children’s attention span is about two-five minutes multiplied by their age.

AgeAttention Span in Minutes
48-20
510-25
612-30
714-35
816-40
918-45
1020-50
1122-55

However, most people believe that adults can only focus for about twenty minutes at a time before they need a break. It seems unlikely that there are many eleven year olds capable of focussing on one task for the best part of an hour.

Twenty Minutes is Enough

A lot depends on what the task is, how interested your child is, and how challenging they find the task. I can read a novel for several hours without needing a break. But if I’m trying to learn a new programming language then my mind will start to wander and I’ll need to shift from reading about it to trying it out, and back again. To keep the love of learning alive, we should aim to stop before the child is bored or fed up. I wouldn’t reccomend trying to study for more than twenty minutes without some kind of shift.

Breaks v. Shifts

A break is when you stop learning altogether. A shift is when you switch to a different activity. Both can help to lengthen the time for which you are able to focus.

Most of the activities in the Frogotter Activity Book include space for exploring the idea and playing with the materials. Playing in this way is a shift of attention, and can enable you to keep a lesson going for longer than twenty minutes. Playing doesn’t tire us in the same way as focussing does. Your child may well be happy to play with one of the activities for longer than twenty minutes. When you’re learning through play, there is plenty of space to relax, and many children are happy to play the same game for a prolonged time.

Shifting mental focus can reset our attention span. Sometimes, a child may be able to do a Literacy activity for twenty minutes followed by a Numeracy activity for another twenty minutes. As the saying goes: a change is as good as a rest. If you need to fit learning into a small part of the day, swapping from one subject to another, or even from one activity to another, can be a good way of preventing exhaustion.

Taking a break to get outside and play, or to have a drink and a snack, can replenish our stock of attention too. This is a particularly good idea after an activity that your child finds difficult.

Move at Your Child’s Pace

If you were teaching a whole class then you might need to stop to settle a child who was disrupting the others, you might have to stop to look after a child who was unwell, you might have to repeat instructions for one child, explain in a different way for another child, and sharpen another child’s pencil. At home, you will only have to do this for one child. Of course, there may be days that your child needs all of this support, and those will probably be the days when your lesson takes a bit longer than usual! But, you won’t be waiting for any other children. So, in general, you can expect your lessons to be a lot shorter than they would be at school.

If your child is quick to grasp a new concept, then you may find a lesson is very short indeed. Conversely, if your child is struggling, you might decide to cut the lesson short to avoid overwhelming them.

However, if your child is enjoying the new material, engaged and interested, then you might decide to take a bit longer, and really explore the activity. It is wonderful to have the freedom to devote time to something that you and your child are really enjoying, and it’s a fantastic way to nuture a love of learning. Many activities will interest your child for longer than twenty minutes. You may even have educational board games that take longer than twenty minutes to play!

Stop if you need to

A school lesson would stop for a fire drill, or lunchtime. So, you can stop if it’s time to go out or make a meal. Home Education is an important part of family life, but it isn’t the only part. Yes, it’s great to give your child the time they need, but, it’s absolutely fine to put the maths game to one side, if you need to attend to another child, or get to work!

If you have a lot of time commitments, you might need to schedule your learning time to fit in with other things. In that case, your lesson length will be dicatated by the other things you have to do.

Legal Requirements

In the UK, there is currently only a very broad definition of what parents are required to do to home educate their children. Home educators are not required to teach to a set timetable, or to provide a set number of hours. However, in the guidance for parents, it states that education should occupy “a significant proportion of a child’s life”. This does suggest that home educated students are expected to devote a reasonable quantity of time to learning. Though, that learning will include reading, music, cooking, playing sports, art, craft, field trips, and engaging in educational projects – it doesn’t mean that most of the day must be devoted to studying from a text book. It does suggest, however, that a good working relationship with your Local Authority would be supported by keeping a rough tally of how your child is spending their time. (If you are using the Frogotter Box, you can download extra record sheets here, to easily keep track.)

In the same guidance, the writers estimate that school attending children receive 5 hours a day of educational input, for 190 days a year; which comes to 950 hours a year, though they clearly state that Home Educators are not expected to meet these figures. In the guidance for Local Authorities, however, the writers mention that independant schools are required to operate for 18 hours a week. This fact doesn’t seem relavent to home educators (who are not trying to register as independant schools) unless it is intended to imply that 18 hours a week (which equates to 684 hours a year) might be considered a reasonable amount of time for education.

How Much Time does Home Education Take?

I did an experiment with my own home educated children, recording to the nearest twenty minutes how they spent their time for two weeks. The teenagers spent more time on book work, the primary aged child more time building his own creations from lego and junk modeling; all spent a few hours a week at sports clubs and we had one big field trip day to a museum. In total, we did reach about 18 hours a week, so I think it’s an achievable level.

Another blogger, Monkey Mum, has done her own estimate of how much focused learning time is actually available for primary school teachers, here. She estimates that time to be about 100 minutes per school day, equating to only 316 hours and 40 minutes a year.

A lot depends on how you count education. I don’t think that young children should have focussed lessons that exceed twenty minutes. But, I do think that children can engage in educational play for far longer. I also think that extended play – especially creative play – can count towards your weekly total of educational time.

Categories
Home Education

Lockdown Schooling

Contents of Box

As the UK returns to Lockdown, I know many parents are frustrated and concerned about returning to Lockdown Schooling. And, many teachers and schools are frustrated and concerned at having to provide distance learning with no time to prepare.

Online learning had its place, but I think we all agree that it’s not a good idea to sit children in front of a computer all day long!

Hands on learning allows children to explore ideas and to learn through play. Gameschooling makes learning fun and reduces the stress caused in many households when parents are forced to adopt the role of Teacher.

The Frogotter Box is an all inclusive curriculum linked set of resources, ready to use with no preparation at all.

No Preparation Required

Because it requires no preparation, parents and carers don’t need to spend any time searching the internet for ideas, gathering materials, or printing worksheets. You can just open the box and begin. It’s the most efficient use of what little time you can make available to teach – especially handy if you’re combining Home Schooling with Working From Home!

National Curriculum Linked

Because it’s curriculum linked, you can rest assured that it will build on what your children have learnt at school – increasing their confidence. And it will prepare them for returning to school when all this is over. This may be particularly helpful for parents of Year Six children who are concerned about their children being ready to start Secondary School in September.

Gameschooling

Because it’s hands-on and game-based, it will follow naturally from your usual relationship of chatting and playing together. You don’t need to be a teacher to play educational games together. There is a lot of turn taking and collaboration in the Frogotter Activities. This will reduce conflict and pressure and help to make this time positive.

Fun Resources

All the equipment has been chosen to maximize fun and engagement. The wooden animals, magnetic letters and counters are all extremely appealing to children, encouraging them to join in and enjoy learning.

Short Activities

None of the individual activities take very long to complete. Obviously, if children are enjoying themselves they may play for an extended period. But, the activities are designed to allow you to use any ten minutes to make progress. This is really ideal for busy families and for children with short attention spans. You can get a preview of the activities by visiting our Youtube Channel.

Great Value

We’re very sympathetic to parents who need to get things sorted right now. The kit can be reused for siblings, which makes it fantastic value for money. All the equipment can be used time and again. Once your children do return to school, the kit will be brilliant to help with homework, and with reinforcing any concepts that your child needs a bit of extra practice with. We’re offering a special lockdown sale price of £99.60 including postage within the UK. We’ll keep this price until children can return to school.

Personal Support

We’re a home educating family, with four children of our own. We’ve been educating our children for years. We’re available on twitter, instagram and by email to help you with any queries, so you don’t need to feel like you’re on your own!

Tea towel with a picture of a time snail on it

Categories
Home Education

How to Teach Your Child to Read

If you want to teach your child to read, you may be wondering where to start, or puzzled by the huge range of potential resources available. If so, you may want a quick and easy guide!

I can’t promise that teaching your child to read will be entirely quick, or completely easy, but this guide is.

Teach Your Child to Read

Step One – Listen to Books

Reading to your child is a vital step in teaching them to read. It’s also really helpful for building a whole load of other skills. Plus, it’s really fun!

If you want your child to read, they need to know what books are for. So, read to them. Read as many types of books as you can: stories, recipes, poems, guide books, encyclopedias, how-to books; all books are great for this step. As soon as possible, let your child choose books. We go to the library every week (except in Lockdown, of course) and let the children choose their own books. It’s one of their first tastes of independance. Even a baby can indicate which of two options they are more interested in. Encourage your children to choose.

Rather brilliantly, one of the best predictors of children who love to read is having parents who love to read. So a great way of beginning to teach your child to read is to let them see you reading for pleasure. It is actually good for your kids if you pick up a book while they’re watching TV! Hurrah!

Step Two – Teach Your Child to Read Pictures

Before you start with words, look at pictures together. Talking about pictures, spotting details, working out what’s going on – what movement is being represented by a static image – are all great ways of building literacy skills. There’s lots of information about why looking at pictures helps children learn to read, but this is a quick guide. Playing ‘spot the picture’ games is part of teaching children to read. In the Frogotter Box, we use the Time Snail for this step.

Big Time Snail Sheet

Step Three – Identifying Letters

You don’t have to stop talking about pictures to start Step Two, ideally you will keep doing that as well; it will build comprehension skills. But, it’s really easy to add ‘spot the letter’ to your game. In the Frogotter Box, we use the Anatomy Sheet for this game.

Big Anatomy Sheet (with alphabet in lower and upper case)

Once your child has found all the boats on a page, point to a letter ‘b’ and ask if they can spot another ‘b’ just like that one. You can spot letters everywhere, on signs, on packets, on TV, and – of course – in books.

Step Four – Make the Sounds for the Letters

When introducing the letters to your child, say their sounds and not their names. So ‘a’ is pronounced ‘a’ as in the beginning of ‘apple’, not ‘ay’ as in the end of ‘say’. You can find plenty of guides online; here’s ours.

It can take a bit of practice to get the hang of this, but it’s really worth it, as it makes it much easier to get reading. If you put ‘see’ ‘ay’ ‘tea’ together, it sounds nothing like cat; but if you put ‘c’ ‘a’ ‘t’ together, it does!

Step Five – Put the Letters Together

I am a big fan of phonics. It does very well in studies, and really does seem to be a great way to teach your child to read. Plus, it’s not hard to do. Start with a few letters at a time (if you start with s, a, t, p, i; you can get a good handful of words that your child can read, very quickly).

Letters that you can pick up and move around are really handy for this stage. The Frogotter Box has a huge selection of 154 letters (plus three pieces of punctuation) – two capitals and five lowercase of each letter – which have magnetic backs so you can stick them to the whiteboard. We have a lot of fun making words with the letters in our box, you can watch us on youtube.

157 Foam Magnetic Letters

As soon as you can, it’s great to get your child reading books. There are lots of reading schemes out there, hopefully you can get hold of some from your local library. But, if you’re available and ready to read any words that they can’t manage, your child can practise their reading with absolutely any book. Don’t be afraid of letting them choose books that are ‘too hard’ for them; it’s far better to read a ‘too hard’ book that interests your child than a ‘just the right level’ book that doesn’t. Just be on side to help when they get stuck.

Step Six – Blending

Sometimes children struggle to get from sounding out single letters to reading whole words. If you want to teach your child to read whole words, and not just letters, you need to teach them blending. The best way I found is slightly counter-intuitive: start by teaching the child how to split words up into individual sounds. You can see us doing this in ‘Talk like a Tortoise’.

Step Seven – Repeat!

I am a big fan of returning to ideas and activities to help consolidate learning. ‘Repeat’, is one of the key themese of the Frogotter Approach. But, it’s even more important when you’re trying to teach your child to read.

There are loads of sounds in English, and it takes a long time to become familiar with all of them. Keep reading together – even if your children can read to themselves; there’s something very cosy about sharing stories. Keep looking at pictures together, and talk about them. Keep looking at letters and how they build words, once your child has met the first sounds, introduce more, and look at how the same letters can make different sounds – like ‘ow’ in ‘snow’ and ‘ow’ in ‘cow’ – and how different letters can make the same sounds – like ‘oo’ in ‘cool’ and ‘ue’ in ‘blue’. Keep taking those letters apart and putting them back together – it’ll help with spelling, just as much as reading.

Enjoy!

I’ve taught three of my children to read so far. Baby Girl is still on step one, as I write. It has honestly been one of my favourite parts of parenting. Sharing something so brilliant with my children has been a huge pleasure. I hope that you will enjoy sharing reading with your child too.

Categories
Home Education

My Biggest Home Education Mistakes

We’ve been home educating for a while now, but we still seem to be learning all the time. Here are the biggest mistakes we’ve made – so far!

Too Much Flash

When we first started home educating our oldest two children, we really wanted to ensure they enjoyed home education. So every lesson was an adventure! We entered competitions; we cooked feasts; we embarked on big craft projects; we played games. We didn’t want any lesson to be boring.

And, the boys hated it! They became very resistant to all these games and new activities. They struggled to remember anything we were trying to teach them. One day, when struggling to get the boys to take an interest in a lego-themed storytelling activity, frustration reached its peak. We were putting hours of work into planning these elaborate activities and the children just didn’t care!

So, we bought a couple of basic workbooks, we got a big jar of counters to help with maths, and we started cooking the same cake recipe every week. The change was remarkable. We were happier because prep was so much easier. The boys were happier because – without all the flashy distractions – they could actually follow lessons much more clearly and learn much more effectively. They even learnt how to bake that one cake recipe!

Far from boring them, routine and repetition made my children feel secure and made their world easier to understand.

Lesson learnt: sometimes simple is best.

Putting Home Educated Children into Year Groups

With four children of different ages, we know that not all of them are at the same level.

However, age is not the best guide to choosing an activity. We have bought loads of workbooks with ages printed on the front. Sometimes (particularly with English – which is a struggle for two of our children) books aimed at the correct age are far too hard.

The obvious solution was to buy the next age down. It was probably better suited to our children’s ability level. However, they hated the idea of being asked to do work ‘for younger children’ and we’re upset.

The best answer has been to find books with vague – or, even better, no – age rating! Naturally, there is no age-rating on the Frogotter Box!

Lesson learnt: children can be sensitive about the ‘right age’ for their school work.

Doing Everything Apart

One of the great joys of home education is tailoring the education to the individual child. So, obviously, we assumed that each child should have a separate plan: their own box of work, their own desk, their own timetable, individual time with a parent to talk about their lessons.

The children became absolutely fascinated with each others’ work! Every time we tried to help one child, they others would appear, looking over shoulders, offering comments, even (in the case of the toddler) snatching the books and running away with them!

We need a balance. Some activities have to be done alone – the toddler really can’t understand the teen’s algebra! But, it’s really fun to do some things together. And, when we can, it’s great to encourage the children to show off their work to one another. We’ve had a lot of fun doing experiments together, reading books together, watching plays together and playing games together.

Lesson learnt: Learning alongside someone else can be lots more fun than studying solo.

Over Scheduling

This is a mistake we’ve made more than once! There are so many fun groups to join and so many wonderful trips to go on. It’s all too easy to keep saying ‘yes’.

Parkour? Yes! Swimming? Yes! Climbing? Yes! Co-op? Yes, please! Nature Walk? Yes! Natural History Museum? Yes!

The problem is, that we end up with grouchy, tired children, and a house that manages to be an absolute tip even though we never seem to be in it!

When trips are too frequent, they stop feeling like a treat. Having dragged frazzled, moody children around a soft play park and lunch out, I felt frustrated that I’d wasted money and nobody had enjoyed themselves. It turns out that treats are only special if they’re rare! It’s not a treat if it happens all the time.

Now we make sure that – however brilliant the offers are – we have one ‘catch-up day’ a week. A day at home to finish projects and get a bit of housework done. We enjoy our trips far more now that we have enthusiasm for them. We simply can’t go everywhere or see everything. But, realising that helps us to value the things that we do even more.

Lesson learnt: There’s a no end of fun things to do, but there is an end to our supply of energy.