Helping Your Child During Remote Learning

As we take our journey through the remote learning experience, we noticed that sometimes our children seem lost in their class. How do we know? They turn around, walk away from their class, or even start making noises or distracting their siblings. And when you have other children learning remotely at home and a camera shining on your child, these distracting behaviors are a no go. So, what do you do in that situation?

Helping Your Child Stay Focused During Remote Learning

While no one size fits all strategy is going to help every family, we provide practical tips to support you in this journey together. Much of our tips focus on helping your child to find what they need for the day. However, that isn’t enough. We also need to help our child to build their internal motivation as well. So in the beginning, we will set up some external motivators and checks to help our children transition to more internal motivation for staying focused.

Materials for Remote Learning

Well, we bought headphone splitters and a extra headset to complement their headphones and devices. We plug the splitter into their device’s headphone jack and they plug their headphones into one side of the splitter. Then, when we notice that our child looks a little lost, it’s super easy to plug in our own headset into the splitter to listen in during class. We guide them until they get situated and easily unplug our headset when they no longer need us. All this occurs without interrupting our other children’s classes.

We created a remote learning station for each of our children. To see how we did this, be sure to head over to our Remote Learning Stations blog post. On each station we included all their necessary codes and most used materials. This put everything in easy view and quick reach. Plus, our children quickly learned how to access their own classes so they needed less help getting logged in each day.

Placement of Devices

We also set up our children’s devices so we can see them easily and frequently. Sometimes we find our children in tabs or apps on their device that are not school related. Not only can we easily redirect them to class but we can talk with them about the choices they make and the need to make better choices. Having a quick view of your child’s device and work area is a must for us these first few weeks for starting good work habits in our remote environment.

Think about where you will be most of the day. Set up your child’s work station so you have an easy view of their computer screen. This will mean that their back is to you, so they aren’t seeing your work, but you have an eye on them. This may be just outside of your office or against the wall in the room you work the most. With headsets, we have found that the noise isn’t very distracting and you are able to get your work done too.

Organizing While Remote Learning

Our children definitely need support keeping themselves organized. They have access to so much more than they would at school and it quickly becomes overwhelming. To limit how much they have access to, we keep all the papers in a separate area from their workbooks. They have a folder for each class where they keep current papers that they need. When they need new papers, we help them to add those papers to their current work folders and our third and fifth grader are pretty independent in going to get their own papers without making a mess these days.

The trick is to have most papers stored in a separate folder. Only the papers they need right now should be in their current folders. And they will need to clean these out regularly, at least once a week.

Check Their Work Every Day

At the end of school each day, our children show us that they completed all their work. This is super easy in SeeSaw because the To Do section is empty. We can also see his work in his journal and look over anything he has done. This quick check each day will give you a great view into what you child is learning as well.

With Schoology, seeing that all the work is completed takes a bit more work. But we have found that the calendar is super helpful. Not only can we see what work has been assigned or should be completed, but we can also click right on the assignment and see our daughter’s work. This helps us to see if she has finished something or still needs to finish something. Often times the work is finished, but just needs to be submitted.

Finally, we spend some time talking with our children about the expectations and how they believe they are meeting these expectations, where they believe they need to improve and what we can do to help. Our daughter asked for post-it notes to keep track of her work, vocabulary words, etc. Our son wanted a clip to keep some work close at hand on his remote learning board. It’s okay to make changes throughout the year and listen to your children as they may have some great ideas!

We Would Love to Connect with You

As you continue on your remote learning journey, you may find new areas where you child needs a little added support. Do you have a kindergarten or preschool child who would benefit from some help with her pencil grip? Check out our Kindergarten Pencil Grip and Scissors, Oh My! blog post. Looking for ways to extend Remote Learning, we’ve got you covered. Grab our free easy writing templates too. Head on over to our Learning to Read Series to support your child’s reading development at home. Finally, don’t miss our strategies for Teaching Math Facts at home.

Drop us a comment below and let us know if you found some of these tips and strategies helpful for tackling remote learning. We’d love for you to subscribe to our newsletter to join our community and receive practical solutions to real-life parenting problems and a free freebies here and there.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.