Using School Cancellation to Teach Different Curriculum
In many parts of the country and world, even on military installations, school is closed and likely to be closed for the rest of the school year. Parents and teachers are rightfully concerned that this will lead to a significant regression in learning, resulting in lowered scores on state standardized tests.
However, having kids at home, and for many of you that are now homebound as well, “no school” creates opportunities for enhanced learning, teaching kids things that are not typically taught in school, lifetime lessons and values that will endure long after memorizing multiplication tables.
Now is a good time to teach kids how to set a table. In fact, it is a good time to use the table for family meals and conversation (half of all American families don’t eat meals together).
The kitchen is a treasure trove for teaching fractions, like using measuring spoons and cups for baking, learning to make 10 meals on their own, and the chemistry of how baking powder actually works.
Now is a great time to teach kids the value of wanting less and having more. We live in such a consumer-driven society—with stores closed, it is a great time to take inventory of all that you do have if you didn’t spend another dime for the next month.
Speaking of dimes, help your child learn about money: How to save, how one dime saved leads to a small fortune in 10 years, and how to create a family budget.
For media time, let’s turn off the television, game boys, internet, phone, and other devices for 22 hours every day. OMG, that could actually open the eyes of children that the world outside is a natural wonder.
Using social distancing, kids can learn how to plant flowers and vegetables and create their own garden. They can study the birds that nest in their trees and take hikes with you to places that are so beautiful. Every town has parks, nature preserves, country roads, and streams just waiting for you.
Books in your home, long neglected, can open doors to places they have never been. The maps and atlases take kids to Borneo, Kansas, the Falkland Islands, and Prague. And, reading to children is perhaps the greatest bond and learning tool a child will ever experience.
For many, many years, I ran an alternative K-12 school in Portland, Maine, and I would teach a course for graduating seniors called, “everything you should have learned in school, but we didn’t teach.” It included lessons on car insurance, credit card dangers, how to read a bus schedule, change a tire, deal with conflict, and other life long skills.
But, it doesn’t stop there. Your home is the primary learning center for values. Kindness, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, tolerance, humility, joy, gratitude, and integrity—though sadly, not test items on state assessments—are the underpinnings of all that really matters, and it starts in your home’s learning center.
And finally, (though your own added curricular ideas are precious as well), let’s talk about their bedrooms. This is a time to teach Zen, the art of simplicity, cleanliness, order, and how all of this leads to inner peace. Their room is a sanctuary, a place to read, reflect, dream, create, aspire, rest, and learn the greatest lesson schools never teach: to be at peace within one’s self.
The home/parents are the first and most important schools of learning for our children. Let’s take advantage of this unexpected window of opportunity.
William Shuttleworth can be found on Facebook and is a USAF veteran that walked across America to raise awareness of veteran issues. wshuttleworth@hotmail.com
