Five Ideas to get grandparents involved with Home Education

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I’m really lucky that my parents have been supportive of our decision to home educate the children. Admittedly, they did have questions when we first talked about it as an option but, some four years on I am sure they can see the benefits that it brings to us as a family and can see how the children are learning and progressing.

My parents have always been really engaged with the children and their learning and it’s certainly been strange not seeing my parents in the way that we would usually. However, the era we live in means that we can send video or do zoom calls  Here is five ways to get grandparents involved in lockdown education.

Play a Quiz

At the moment Em is working on a project about Kingfishers and as part of that is writing a quiz. She wants to run the quiz on zoom for her grandparents and this is a great way for children to show off what they’re learning and to test their older relatives; children love nothing more than being able to demonstrate that they know more about something!

Set an Inventors Challenge

Set a range of challenges. I’ve been looking at the little inventor mini challenges. The children could present these ‘Dragon’s Den’ style to their grandparents and get them to quiz them on their inventions. People often look at things in different ways and by getting children to send a video or email outlining their invention and the problem it’s seeking to solve will not only help them in presenting their ideas but will also give them food for thought with the questions that are posed back to them. The sillier the better for tasks like this and it’s worth letting children research different ideas too, there are often things out there that exist that children aren’t always aware of (such as these Age UK Mobility aids). By letting children explore these existing inventions helps them to them further develop their ideas.

Stories by Zoom

Sharing a story by zoom isn’t the same as being sat snuggled on the sofa reading together, but it does mean that children can listen to someone else. You could even turn it into a game with making up different parts of the story or reading alternate pages each. My parents have listened to H reading his ‘learning to read’ books (I photographed the pages he was reading to share on screen) and H was so pleased he was able to demonstrate his learning and reading skills.

Nature Walks

When rules allow, heading out for a nature walk together is one of the few ways that we can meet. Heading out for a walk a just being together to explore somewhere is great. Perhaps choosing a favourite walking spot of the children’s for them to show their grandparents their route or the things they notice is a great way for children to take the lead and maybe teach their grandparents a thing or two and show them some secret dens!

Share a Project

We do a lot of project-based learning and we have arranged times to share this with my parents. The children recently learnt about Robins and as part of that they each showed some of their work via zoom. My parents are keen bird spotters so it was lovely for them to share this mutual interest and for the children to show what they had learnt. They are currently working on another bird-themed project and hope to share that via zoom too.

Lockdown learning is hard and being separated from family for so long is tough, but utilising technology to keep connections alive means that grandparents can still be a supportive part of home education.