Homeschooling during pandemic

Raising My Knight
May 3, 2021
3 min read

Updated: Apr 18, 2023

My son was 5.5yrs when we started elearning or long distance learning. It wasnt our cup of tea to be honest. From limited screen time to an excess of screen time. Moving from books to all things digital wasnt easy. I saw zero effectiveness in learning as a whole and since it was a situation completely out of our control it left us all stressed.

Why I decided to take Knight D out of school?

I honestly felt this was such a difficult time for teachers and kids. My son struggled with keeping up and understanding concepts even though I seen the teacher put so much effort. With a toddler at home and elearning there was grabbing, constant distractions and no learning with assignments to complete.

It was then we decided to take the necessary step. Homeschooling isn’t easy at start as you are taking an additional role and understanding the curriculum you’d like to follow, collecting resources, simplifying concepts and much more.

Does KHDA recognize homeschooling?

iAcademia is recognized by KHDA. Rahhal’ programme recognised by Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority. Students first have to register in one of the 20 participating Dubai private schools. Parents and the school then sign a contract about how much time the student will homeschool instead of attending regular classes and agree on the fees.

How did I start?

First, I decided to pick up second hand text books for the next grade to get a better understanding of what Knight D would be learning in school. I picked math, science, english and social studies to concentrate on. I used the content to plan our learning calendar. Since the second hand books were used I ventured to create my own or buy workbooks that had similar topics.

Second hand books I sourced

We set a routine to study every morning. Each weekend I created a study plan based on our cirriculum. I allowed Knight D to choose the sequence to allow him to have a little control of what topics he was curious to learn about. This was a huge win coz that meant we had less power struggles and cribbing to deal with. Since I wanted Knight D to continue developing his writing, comprehension and reading I created a mix of subjects ranging from math, science, social studies, geometry, comprehension and ended with a book from our home library or Epic app with a drawing activity before lunch.

What did I learn?

Takes a lot of patience as you are a parent and a teacher now. I found it took us a month to be able to get settled in with some wins and fails.

I spent most nights reading to understand how to simplify math and science, creating additional practice worksheets to explore topics we were learning. Thanks to youtube, blogs and so many teaching resources you will always find what your looking for.

It’s perfectly fine to make mistakes coz your learning to. Try to understand your child’s learning style and if today was a fail try again after a few days. If your child is struggling thats fine it your que that you need to find a different approach towards simpifying it and keep repeating variations of it to test their understanding.

What works for us?

We created a routine checklist and placed it for all to see with boxes to check out once a task was achieved. A page with a study plan to achieve for the day. These two played a key role on creating a structure and allowing Knight D to know what was expected during weekdays.

We used https://babyarabia.com/ for online Arabic classes (use code:knight10)

Our daily checklist

On most days I tried to do an invitation to learn where I created a themed project like animals life, plants lifecycle, math game, some art fun or science experiment. This allowed both my boys to learn, explore, discover and have fun.