“Help!” was the word I kept hearing over and over this week when I talked to the parents of several of my former students. 
 
“Please help, he’s totally lost.  The worksheets arrive on the computer screen with absolutely no instructions.  I don’t know what to do.”
 
“Can you help?  She did so well in your program, but now, she just sits and cries.”
 
“You have to find a way to help; we can’t go on like this.  They send so many worksheets that it takes him all day and part of the night to finish.”
 
Teachers, parents, and students are completely and totally frustrated trying to do online education, but, as we discussed in my last blog post, simply opening the schools, rolling out the school buses, and packing the students back into the classrooms during a pandemic is not the best answer.  So, what can we do?
 
Like everything else, my reading clinic is closed because of the coronavirus.  The safety of our children always comes first.  I am presently developing an online program for this summer.  It’s not easy.  First, we are a volunteer organization on a very limited budget.  Second, I run a group-centered program that emphasizes both learning and counseling.  How do I put that online?  That’s also the question many teachers are asking.
 
How do I teach my students online?  The answer is not by attaching as many worksheets as possible to the school computers.  Yes, as I’ve said before and will say again, there are many teachers out there who are doing a phenomenal job, very creative and totally engaging their students in the learning process.  Unfortunately, there are also many teachers out there who are simply attaching one or two worksheets each week and saying to themselves, “that will do.”
 
No, it will not do.  It is not safe to send students back to school, so how can we help teachers do a better job of teaching online?  Yes, there is a difference between teaching online and simply putting worksheets on-screen.
 
Professor Andy Hargreaves at Boston College stated that the important thing is “keeping kids engaged with learning and the idea of learning.”  Professor Hargreaves gives 19 suggestions.  Let’s look at some of his ideas:
 
“Don’t send parents heaps of worksheets.”
 
Yes, some teachers are just stuffing one worksheet after another worksheet on the school computer and sending it home to the students.  Often, teachers do not even explain how to complete the worksheet.  These “on-screen teachers,” as Hargreaves labels them, rarely, if ever, send videos or instructional information home to the students.  The student just gets a pile of worksheets.  The only difference is that instead of photocopying the worksheets for the classroom, the teachers are placing them on-screen.  Sorry, I do not classify that as teaching.  We must do better.
 
Look at this time of homeschooling as an “opportunity for learning, not an interruption.”  
 
In other words, be positive.  This message goes for teachers, parents, and even students—even for grandparents, I know I am working hard to create exciting, engaging lessons for my grandson, but I am also looking at the four hours a day that I am teaching him as a gift.  I know that I do not get this opportunity all the time.  I want to make the best of this time, and as a psychologist, I want to support his mental health as well as his education.  Children and teens are sad.  This time of quarantine has been hard on them.  Yes, it has been hard on parents and teachers as well, but we must remember every day to reach out and try to brighten the world of any and all students that we have the opportunity to teach and work with.
 
Each day we should try to help students “learn a new skill.” 
 
This suggestion is particularly appropriate.  Imagine what would happen if teachers sat down each week to prepare their online lessons, asking themselves—"What new skill can I teach my students this week?”  The same can be said of students.  What if they turned on the computer on Monday morning asking, “I wonder what new skill we’ll be learning this week?”  Wow! What a different approach to education. 
 
I have the children make pop-up books at my reading clinic, and I have introduced making pop-up books to my grandson.  We are on to our second pop-up book.  Recently, I’ve been using pop-up books to teach science lessons. I showed pictures of our coral reef pop-up book earlier.  Our next plans are to make a pop-up outer space book,  If pop-up books are a little more than you want to tackle, try something simpler.  
 
Even young children can make a picture book.  Staple several pages of paper together.  Have the child think of a story that they want to tell.  Then, they may color a picture for each step in telling the story.  Once they have finished the pictures, you can sit down with the child and help them write their story, or you can write the story for very young children. 
 
With a video or Skype lesson, children can make all kinds of projects at home.  Make them new, different, and hands-on.  Research tells us that hands-on learning is the absolute very best way to teach students of any age. 

To create a simple pop-up book like the ones above, children need to follow directions. They can write their stories, or facts they learned in their lessons, inside the books. This makes learning enjoyable and creates intrinsic motivation for them to continue their education.

See my previous post, "Should Schools Be Reopened?"

The battle lines have been drawn.  Protesters have taken to the streets.  Parents are even lining their children up along sidewalks—without masks--giving them cardboard signs that read, “Education is my Right,”  “Open up the zoo,” “I miss my friends.” 
 
Such fanaticism makes me wonder if our concern is about education, or do we just want to get the children out of the house and return to free child care?  Perhaps I am misreading these signs and the primary concern really is the quality of education that our children are receiving. 
 
What should we do?  Is reopening the schools safe?  That is the debate at present.  Some say yes, reopen schools; there are not that many children dying from the virus so it would be okay to reopen schools.  Just send students back to school. However, Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College in London who worked on the scientific modelling in England, advised the government there not to reopen because, as he stated, school closings play an important role in helping the entire country recover.  As Professor Ferguson stated:
 
“When combined with intense social distancing it [school closing] plays an important role in severing remaining contacts between households and thus ensuring transmission declines.” 
 
And yet, here in the U. S., we are still debating what to do.  It has been estimated that one-fourth of our school children do not have adequate internet access. Surveys are showing that some families only have Internet access through their cell phones.  Other families simply do not have high speed Internet access.
 
What can be done to help our children, today? 
 
Let’s turn to an experimental research project being conducted at the International School of Monza.  In this program, students and teachers create short videos to share, do video conferencing, and group work—all from home.  They:

• learn basic skills and knowledge at home from videos.
• come together online to evaluate, analyze, and work in groups.
• use “real-time feedback” from teachers to correct assignments as they are written rather than waiting until completed and simply getting a bad grade if you did not complete the assignment correctly.

 
One teacher explains that this provides a way to reach struggling students. While students are researching and writing, “I can call a weaker student to a private call and quietly work with them giving them the extra support they need,” says Julia Peters who teaches at the International School of Monza.  
 
If this kind of technology is already available, why are we not using it?
 
I have always been an advocate for improving the quality of education.  I am also an advocate for hands-on education rather than computer-based education. Still, during the coronavirus pandemic, I must stand with those who say the best way to educate our children right now is to teach them at home through computer-based learning.
 
Are we doing the best that we can do with computer-based learning?  No, we are not.  Just as when students are sitting in the classroom, some teachers are going out of their way to be as creative and innovative as possible, while, just as when children are in the classroom, some teachers are doing only what is required by their administrator.  As a country, we are not doing the best that we can do.  Our children deserve more.
 
How can we make education better?  As a research psychologist, I will always heavily lean toward what science says.  So, what is research telling us?  One reference that I found very helpful stated that we should: 

1. Require more training and infrastructure for distance learning. Obviously, if your child received a stack of worksheets this week on their school computer with absolutely no explanation for what the worksheets taught or how the student was to complete the worksheets correctly, you know firsthand that  teachers need more training in distance learning.

2. Expand access to broadband. Comcast, Verizon, and charter are mentioned in the article as offering free or low-cost high-speed Internet to low-income families, but we need more.

3.  Broadcast over TV free. The article mentions that PBS is offering some programming at present. So why are we not doing more?  Even most low-income families have TV.  Why are we not turning our televisions into educational classrooms?
 
Andreas Schleicher, the head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, of which the U. S. is a member, leaves us with one somber reminder to think about: 
 
“It is clear that this will not reach everyone and it’s not just a matter of access to devices,” he says.  “If you don’t know how to learn on your own, if you don’t know how to manage your time, if you don’t have intrinsic motivation, you won’t be very successful in this [computer-based] environment.”
 
So, what should we do?  Should we continue with the haphazard online education being sent home at present (some good—some not), should we totally embrace online learning as demonstrated at the International School of Monza, or should we just send the children back to school and pretend it’s okay?

We assume that because the child has been shown both capital and lowercase letters that they have learned them. This is not the case, and this is one of the first big mistakes often made in teaching reading.  Just because your child can sing the alphabet song, does not mean that they know the alphabet letters and their sounds.

So, if you are teaching a preschool or kindergarten child, start with the alphabet.  Teach both the capital letters and lowercase letters.  Teach them separately.  Then mix the capital and lowercase letters together, not in alphabetical order and not in pairs, to make sure that children can identify both capitals and lowercase letters.  Rearrange the alphabet letters so that the child is looking at the letter and identifying the letter, not just remembering it from the song

Don’t try to teach reading before you have even laid the foundation for learning about words.  Teach the alphabet first.  Then, you will have a much stronger foundation for teaching reading later.

This is the kind of foundation that vowel clustering is built upon.  Once the child has letter identity, letter shape, and letter sounds, then you are ready to introduce simple words, but not before.  It’s like building a house. Build the foundation before you try to add the roof. 

Handwriting and reading are connected, so, if you want to teach a child to read, you must also teach a child to write.  Improving a child’s handwriting is one of the first steps in helping a child learn to read. It is not enough to just be able to sing the alphabet song; although, the alphabet song is very helpful in learning to alphabetize.  To read, the student must also be able to identify and say the name of each alphabet letter. Then, the student must be able to write the letters correctly. 

Teach handwriting on manuscript writing paper.  I have children use paper that has half-inch ruling with a dotted midline.  Yes, I know that it is hard to find supplies, and we are not allowed to go out shopping right now, so, if you need to, make your own manuscript paper.  You can even use scrap paper or old left-over wrapping paper.  Use the back of a page.  Draw a baseline with a dotted midline and half-inch ruling between.  Use a ruler and maybe a T-square, it’s not difficult to make your own paper. You might also find downloadable templates for manuscript paper. Make sure that they use half-inch ruling with a dotted line in the middle. 

As the stay-at-home orders, school closings, community lock downs, and coronavirus threat continue, many parents and schools are struggling with how to teach children at home.  Yet, while some struggle, a parent I spoke with recently thought their child was doing better with homeschooling than they had in the classroom.  As I have said many times, every single child is different, even identical twins.  Children also learn differently and need different teaching methods. That is why I use 12 different teaching techniques in my Reading Orienteering Club afterschool program.  If you would like to read more about these teaching techniques, I discuss each technique in detail in a series of blogs that I wrote starting on January 16, 2018 and concluding on June 2, 2018.  [Click on the appropriate links on the right to see these posts.]

A parent asked me, “How can I teach vowel clustering to my child while your reading clinic is closed?  You’ve been promising a new parenting book, but I need help now.”  My new book is stuck on the editor’s desk.  I apologize that it’s not ready when we most need it.  I do have an older book on vowel clustering that is available and that some parents have found helpful.  [Click the envelope icon on the top right  to email me if you’re interested.] 

In the meantime, let’s revisit the principles of vowel clustering and how to teach vowel clustering at home.  Yes, however, you can start to teach vowel clustering right now. 

In my last post, I promised to talk about how to work with nonreaders or early readers and that will be the focus of our discussion today.  In kindergarten and in many preschools, children are given a list of words to memorize.  Wrong.  You can go back to almost any of my previous blog posts to find why teaching children to memorize words is a mistake. (See, for example, my blog post of December 31, 2016).  The best answer though is given by Dr. Sally Shaywitz, M. D., dyslexia specialist (see Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia, 2003):  “Children do not learn to read by memorizing a word list. Most children especially those who struggle in reading do not learn to read by memorizing phonics rules” (p. 78).   

What should a parent do instead?

Dr. Shaywitz goes on in her book to say that, if we teach letter sounds instead of memorization, that almost every single child across the nation could learn to read.  Vowel clustering begins by teaching letter sounds.
 
There is nothing wrong if a child wants to learn to read before kindergarten, many children do, but we should never push a child to learn to read that early.  First, we need to remember that normal childhood development for preschool and kindergarten children is focused on action, not sitting.  Therefore, use hands-on learning techniques. 
 
For young children, keep your teaching sessions active. You could make an alphabet train.  Have children line up their stuffed animals, identify each animal by name, and then ask what letter sound the child hears when you say the animal’s name.  Have the child arrange their stuffed animals into alphabetical order.  You’re learning, having fun, and teaching a very important beginning principal needed for reading.  If you do not have a stuffed animal to represent a particular alphabet letter, have the child draw a picture and place a picture of an animal that would fit for the appropriate alphabet letter.  Yes, you may need to get creative, especially with the letter X.  Use the computer and try websites such as this for help: 
 
Older children, able to write or draw, may have fun making an alphabet book.  Kindergartners love to make alphabet books.  Don’t forget free coloring book pages for young children who need help drawing an animal picture.

Instead of memorizing words, preschool and kindergarten children should be working on

1. identifying both capital and lower-case letters (remember to teach lowercase letters separately from uppercase letters.),
2. writing capital and lower-case letters on manuscript paper (again, remember to teach the writing of lowercase alphabet letters separate from uppercase or capital letters.  We mostly read with lower case letters; therefore, children must learn to work with lowercase letters.),
3. learning the sounds for all of the consonant letters.  I do not teach vowel sounds until first grade. 

You and your child can have fun together as the child continues to learn while the schools are closed.  My upcoming post will talk about teaching children to recognize letters by working on their handwriting.   

What can we do to help our children get an education while schools are closed? Any age of child can make a book about birds, and this is a perfect time because many birds can be seen in the yard through the window.  Hummingbirds have returned to my house this week, and I have two very cute new little birds that seem to be checking out the backyard to see if they want to move in.  Birdwatching can be very interesting for children, particularly if the bird lives in their backyard so that they can frequently watch it.  Older students may even try to identify birds from pictures on the Internet.  Here’s one helpful guide.

• Preschool and kindergarten students can sit and watch a video about birds, possibly even a story about a particular bird, and then color a picture of that bird.  There are several free coloring pages available online that you may copy and provide for your child to color.  The child can watch the video and figure out which color each bird should be.  In this way, they are practicing their colors as well as their listening skills.
• First and second graders might also watch a video, color a free coloring page, and then write a sentence or two telling what they learned from the video.  Even if a young child only writes:  “The bird is blue,” that’s a start.  As long as they are writing a complete, correct grammatical sentence, they are learning.
• Third, fourth, and fifth graders can take the next step and write a paragraph about each bird that they view on the video.  Learning to write complete sentences and paragraphs is one of the major learning steps for all elementary students.  This age group may either read an article or watch a video.  Make sure it’s factual and accurate.  Then, have students make a list of the facts they learned and write a paragraph telling what they learned. 
• This could be a project for all ages.  You simply increase the requirements appropriate for the age.  While you work.  They work.  You can make a bird book.  Older students may decide to draw or paint their own pictures.  Use the supplies you have at home and be creative.  Learning really can be fun.

Students can bind their pages with a hole punch and string. They can draw or paint a bird picture on the cover. 
 
Next week, we will look at how to teach beginning letter sounds to young children and how to teach comprehension skills to older children.  Yes, as we pray for everyone’s safety, we can make this time at home an educational time.  Work on a bird report this week and have fun.

A parent emailed me this week saying, “Help!  I’ve run out of worksheets.  The school hasn’t sent anything else.  What do I do?”  For the first week or so, many students were busy working their way through a giant packet of worksheets.  Unfortunately, we’re all still at home and it is not yet safe for schools to reopen.  Some schools have even announced that they are closed indefinitely.  Many say there’s not much of a chance for reopening this year.  Naturally, parents are asking, “Are my children going to simply lose three months of schooling?” 

Yes, some schools are doing a fantastic job and making the most of their computer capabilities.  Other schools are not so sure what to do and thereby leave parents scrambling to provide educational materials.

We all want our children to stay safe, but as parents and grandparents, we are concerned about their education.  If you look online, there are lots of freebies being offered. Some are good.  Many are not.
My suggestions for the week are: 

Scholastic still tops my list because they offer so much variety for all ages.  They also offer new stories and articles each week.  Preschoolers and kindergartners can sit down and listen to someone read a story to them.  There are often even activities included.  Elementary age children have stories and activities that are appropriate for each age.  The list goes up to ninth grade.  Also, look around at each age grouping.  For example, if your child is a third grader but interested in outer space, you might look at the article about people traveling to Mars in the sixth through ninth grade section.  You might need to read this article to your child, but it can generate lots of interesting discussion and maybe even a project or two.  Be creative.  

National Geographic videos will always be on my list.  The photography is fantastic, and they provide accurate facts.  You need to be careful with some information available on the Internet.  Just because it’s on the Internet does not mean it is correct.  Look for quality sources like National Geographic.  

1. Virtual tours can also be educational.  I discovered a virtual tour of the International Space Station this week, and this is just one example.  Go exploring!  
2. I like to look for educational activities that say they are fact checked. I particularly like the example given on one website for learning about different cultures.  You could read, explore, write, and even draw or make costumes for each culture.  Children love to play dress-up. Have them think about how someone would dress in a different country.  You can even make costumes out of old catalogs and recycled paper.  No, it doesn’t have to cost money.  Check for ideas like these.    

 
 Maybe you are saying, “I want to do more than just keep my child occupied and busy; I don’t want my child to fall behind on their schoolwork.”  Good, there’s lots you can do even as you juggle children and your job while you work from home:
​

1. Set a schedule.  Have agreed upon times when you will both sit down and work. The child’s work will, of course, vary depending upon their age.
2. Check with your school.  Many of the math textbooks offer instructional videos that can be used at home.
3. Create projects.  Children and teenagers enjoy working on a project.  My grandson and I are still working on our coral reef pop-up book.  Here we have a simple coral reef popup book and a complicated coral reef popup book that a child could make. 

If this is more than you want to tackle, try making a simpler book. My upcoming post talks about helping children make a simple book about birds while they are stuck indoors during the pandemic.