How can I help my child fly at the moment?

Home Schooling is new to most of us and we will be trying to get our head around how to make sure our child doesn’t fall behind during this time and keeps up with everyone else. I have seen social media going mad with what people are doing with their children and there are some great ideas – some of us might start feeling competitive and feel like we need to do what others are doing. If we are not careful, home schooling might clip our children’s wings more than the school system sometimes does.

I am excited to think that this time is an opportunity for us to try different approaches and connect even more with our children and their uniqueness.

Here are a few thoughts to consider how to help your child fly at the moment:

1. Be aware of different learning preferences.

It’s an opportunity to connect more with our children and learn what makes them tick – their personality and work preferences may be different to ours so pushing them to follow a strict timetable might really motivate them or it might suffocate them. We will need to find out what helps them fly in terms of how they would like to learn in the coming weeks and we will only be able to discover this by asking them and observing their behaviours.  We will need to be brave enough to give them more freedom and responsibility to do it their way.

2. Be mindful of different expectations

We will already have expectations around what is achievable for our child – based on our own ideas and assumptions  – these expectations might be so high that our child can’t reach them so gives up trying or so low that our child isn’t excited by them and sees learning as a chore.

A conversation around expectations where we invite our child to imagine possibility and create their own expectations can often lead to surprising results.  In this conversation we can share our encouraging beliefs, but we need to do so in a way that stops them trying to live up to our expectations and gives them more control of their own goals and achievements.

3. Seize the Day

These circumstances create many opportunities for learning to fly. We can get really creative with how our children learn – we can introduce them to new and fun ways of learning because right now there are no rules – imagine how they might grow if we let them.

Remember there is no right or wrong way to do this – just your way. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it that really matters and the more you let your child lead their own learning and take responsibility, the more they will feel like they can fly.

We will be sharing ideas to help children learn to fly during this time so please follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter and share your ideas with us. We are using hashtag #virtualflyingschool.