5 tips for adapting your curriculum for home learning

HOME LEARNING CURRICULUM PLAN

As we face a second wave of COVID-19, all schools in England must have a home learning plan in place.

If you’re still struggling to adapt your curriculum for remote learning, here are five tips based on our own experience of adapting our ‘Learning Means The World’ global curriculum into a home learning version for our member schools.

Ensure your home learning curriculum has breadth

It’s easy to just focus on Maths and English. There are plenty of home learning resources available for the core subjects. However, children still need to develop holistically, and this means their learning in other areas should be seen as important, too. 

With this in mind, look at how you’ve mapped foundation subjects within your curriculum. Think about how you can teach them in a way that ensures progression and development across the curriculum.

Focus on quality, not quantity

Inevitably, parents won’t cover everything remotely. So, take a practical attitude and focus on the priorities when adapting your curriculum for a home environment.

With many parents juggling remote learning and home schooling, it’s crucial not to overwhelm families with large quantities of work.

Collaborate

Adapting your curriculum for home learning should be a collaborative effort, drawing on the experience of your entire teaching team, and parents, too.

Ask for – and take on board – feedback from parents on what worked and didn’t work during the first lockdown period. Then, use this to inform how you build your home learning plan for future.

Use Zoom, WhatsApp or Microsoft Teams to connect with colleagues while adapting your curriculum for remote learning. This way, everyone is involved, aware and confident in supporting parents to use home learning plans effectively. 

Be flexible

Many families with more than one child may share a single device for remote learning. Even families with several devices may struggle to juggle the demands of multiple lessons being taught simultaneously.

Therefore, it’s more realistic to take a flexible approach to the tasks you set and your expectations of when children will complete them, rather than establishing strict deadlines.

While you may be setting daily tasks, operate a flexible policy for submitting work. This allows families to adapt and organise their home-schooling schedule in a way that works best for them.

Make activities accessible for all

Not everyone has a printer at home. So, limit the paperwork parents need to access to teach a topic or lesson.

Use interactive, online tools instead of paper handouts. Plan lessons and activities around items everyone can easily find within the home to make learning inclusive for all households. 

The resources available at home are obviously going to be limited compared to what children would normally use in school. So, get creative in how you adapt lessons so that readily available materials and objects can be used.

Find out more

Interested in finding out more about LMTW@HOME, our home learning programme?

We’ve adapted our ‘Learning Means The World’ curriculum for remote learning, to make it easier for you to get home learning right.

Available now to all member schools as part of their membership, LMTW@HOME is full of useful resources, lesson plans and tips to help your school through the challenges of teaching during a pandemic.

 

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