How to teach my nursery kids online?

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused school closures all over the world. With over 1.2 billion children out of school and only about 861 million children learning from home, parents all across the world have been forced to assume the job of a teacher’s support in addition to their existing roles. As a result, education has changed dramatically. E-learning, in which teaching is done remotely and on digital platforms, has risen abruptly in great strides. Interestingly, online learning has been shown to increase information retention in lesser time, implying that the changes caused by the coronavirus are here to stay.

Teaching nursery kids is much more challenging than teaching a grown-up kid. Teaching kids is effective when incorporated with activities such as riddles, voice & video recordings, time-bound games, puzzles, role plays, colours, music, dancing, singing, running, jumping, climbing, treasure hunts. Another idea is to have children set up an obstacle course using pillows or toys, and then narrate their movement with the appropriate subject. For example, when learning English they could use prepositions that describe their positions and spatial relationships. One of the most frustrating aspects of the transition to online learning is the inevitable increase in screen time for students of all ages. This concern is worsened for parents by the complexities of getting their 3 & 4 yos learn online and sit at a place. Some of the most successful virtual instruction strategies and best practices emerging in teaching kids as young as 4-6yo, range from making the class creatively interesting to suggestions for recording children to get their attention.

1. Understand a young child’s behaviour and create a learning environment that encourages development.
2. Try more innovative ways than you might think might be required.
3. With disrupted family routines, it may be difficult for you to get your kid trained online especially if there’s a baby crying when their first grader is asking for help during an online class, or if the parent needs to go to work themselves. 
4. Talk to your kids and connect with them. Explain them situations at home such as work or a younger sibling and urge & encourage them to sit in a place to learn. I know its easier said than done but most children reciprocate to truthful exchange of heart. 
5. Teaching is basically an experiment that can flop but even then, it can provide you more information on the learning pattern that you can follow in the next lesson to be effective. Remember, there’s no such thing as one size fits all when it comes to learning strategy.  Every child may have a different way of grasping concepts and learning new things! Don’t cage them in a pattern.  
6. Use materials that are commonly found in your homes to ease the burden of learning on yourself and the child. Consider keeping a preschool kit or box with materials you often use in your lessons, such as play dough, coloured paper, colours, markers, dice, or cards that children can bring to each session, or shapes that children and families could cut out together. This can make your work easier and help keep children’s learning spaces at home organized.

7. Nursery kids have short attention spans: But they are even shorter when children are learning online. Alternate between active and passive activities to help keep children engaged. Sing a song, dance along, read a book, collectively participate in an art activity. Or you could try a group movement activity at home such as creating a dance pattern, or have children do a quick treasure hunt in-home (find three green things) and then sharing and discussing what they found. By finding these things, children are also working on cardinality while moving around.
8. People are learning that there’s something called the Zoom fatigue that’s existent & real; and it takes more time, effort, and sustained attention to follow along during an online class. Preschoolers are no different. In fact, if a preschooler walks away from the screen, they are simply taking a brain break. So please don’t be upset if your child has walked away from an online class.
9. Keep activities short and try breaking up the lesson into small chunks with lots of movement embedded: When in school, children may be able to sit in circle time or the whole group for up to 10 minutes, but that same circle time activity may not hold their attention when viewed in a live online platform such as Google Classroom or Zoom. 
10. Set a routine and stick to It; it helps set expectations in children and makes them aware of their fixed, repeated study time. Teach your child to greet the teacher.  
11. Enhance your kids’ study experience by using picture books after an online lesson for them to be able to grasp the learning properly. You could also use Ebooks available online with good illustrations or surf the internet to show them visually what they have been taught in the online class to reinforce the concepts.

Make use of lessons that teach double (or triple) than what it looks like it’s going to teach. As an example language and literacy can be learnt from a science, social and emotional skills lesson or executive function skills, logic & reasoning can be learnt from math and science lessons. Anno’s Counting Book, for example, takes the reader on a journey through the four seasons while encouraging number sense. The first page begins with zero—a barren winter landscape with nothing to count. However, as the book progresses from zero to one to two, there are more things to count, and the seasons change as well. If you’re teaching children online in the fall, they could collect leaves with their families during breaks and then count, compare, and sort them when they return to class. While sorting, children could describe the characteristics of their leaves (crunchy? crinkly? soft? smooth? Brown or green?

With an activity such as this, children have an opportunity to build their counting sense and vocabulary skills, explore science concepts, and share their experiences with others wound them without hesitation.

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