I’m not sure if parents realise that teacher-parents also despise remote learning. If I wanted to spend 2 hours a day fighting with someone, I’d just go on Twitter. Instead, I spend every morning sitting at the kitchen table thinking of any way I can make the remote learning any more interesting and if there is any way I don’t have to sit there with my 6 year old.
Our son’s teacher has been amazing. She sends us activities to do on SeeSaw every day and there is great variety in them. We also have his textbooks so there’s points in the learning where he can work away in these. On these small occasions, I pop on to Google Classroom or my email to check in with my class or answer a quick question.
Inevitably though, the remote learning takes twice as long because we spend half the time fighting about whatever activity we’re doing.
I came up with a really simple idea to make by life more bearable. Don’t get too excited but it made the remote learning a little easier. I noticed we have 6 seats at our kitchen table and we were only using 2 of them – one for him and one for me. What if I turned each seat around the kitchen table into a learning station? Better yet, what if it could be an independent learning station so I could get some proper time to catch up on my own work? The Kitchen Table Stations were born!
The idea was to set out 2-3 stations that were from his school, so I’d have to help with these, and the rest could be independent problem-solving tasks. OK, there was some initial teaching him how to do the tasks but after a couple of goes he worked away on the daily tasks.
They included a daily LEGO challenge, a colour mixing challenge with paint, some sort of colour-by-numbers or wordsearch type activity, a sentence building activity, a word-building activity, and lots of others. The pictures around this article should give you a flavour and we posted up what we could on our Instagram channel with the hashtag #kitchentablestations