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In this confinement we are experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic, many families are seeing their children’s learning process disturbed by school closures. If you are a parent, you probably want to help maintain your kids’ learning process active but maybe you’ve been wondering just how to do that.
As a matter of fact, teaching at home or turning yourself into a sort of homeschool teacher can be difficult and generate many challenges. However, in these times where we have to adapt to new situations and responsibilities, implementing small actions and going back to basics can be very helpful. Therefore, if you are looking to teach your children at home, turning to reading activities is one of the most easily accessible options, and in this article, we’ll explain why and how to find appropriate activities.
Reading as a key to learning
Reading is one of the key elements of learning since it is one of the most basic mechanisms for transmitting information and knowledge. Apart from its intrinsic value as a hobby and beyond the framework of purely literary knowledge, as a complex cognitive activity reading is an indispensable tool for the construction and development of the mind. Reading activities bring benefits such as:
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Developing analytical skills and logical reasoning
Reading teaches us to decode information, to analyze it, and to establish links between different elements in order to interpret them, as commented by the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield in the Daily Mail. Through this process, children can exercise analytical skills that are useful to them not only in many academic subjects but also in their daily lives.
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Increasing concentration capabilities
Maintaining reading habits also has a positive impact on the ability to concentrate. Indeed, understanding and assimilating all the information contained in a book requires the reader’s full attention during an extended period of time. In this way, through a playful medium that awakens their interest, children can increase their ability to stay focused on one topic, improving their ability to assimilate and retain information at the same time.
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Fostering creativity
In addition, as pointed out in a study carried out by the therapist Nicole Speer from the University of Washington, reading activities are excellent to stimulate children’s imagination, as they use it to create different scenarios in their minds, visualize characters, predict outcomes based on given information, etc. The capacity to create new elements is developed while at the same time the knowledge already acquired is also continually recalled as a basis for creating and completing information.
Becoming a temporary homeschool teacher using digital literacy tools
If you want to teach your kids at home, reading activities are a simple but very powerful alternative to keep them actively learning. To make your tutoring easier, using specialized literacy tools can be very helpful. It is important that these platforms are offered by the educational center, in line with the teaching program, but giving parents the opportunity to be more engaged in the training process.
Indeed, these solutions are specially designed to respond to learning needs according to age, with materials and resources specifically selected for their academic interests.
Also, if you use digital learning tools, you’ll be guided, following previously established reading and writing plans, with enriched materials and questions developed according to different topics and skills to exercise, so that as a parent you don’t have to improvise lessons but rather follow a predefined program and supervise your children in their development.
It is also important that you rely on educational solutions that help you track and evaluate their learning process, through monitoring features highlighting data such as their reading time, their progress in pages or chapters, their performance in exercises, etc. In this way, as a “temporary homeschool teacher” you will have a reference framework to assess the progress of the lessons you’re providing.
It is understandable that in these times more than ever, parents want to provide their children with the best education and may be worried about not being able to do it themselves from home. However, as we have seen, reading is a simple way to keep actively learning without having to quickly develop too many technical skills (such as an experienced tutor might have) or resort to too many new materials. For this reason, we advise you to rely on reading and writing activities and to use digital learning tools in order to offer your children a simple but effective alternative.