In this episode, Claire remotely interviews Helen Woodhead, a proofreader at Classroom Secrets and now, through her videos of home-learning activity ideas, a Facebook Live star. Alongside her two children, Gabriel (4) and Noah (7), Helen regularly presents short, accessible and easy to follow videos on Classroom Secrets’ Facebook groups. These videos showcase fun and practical tips and suggestions for parents who, with the current coronavirus restrictions, will be finding themselves teaching their children at home.
Helen talks about how she always wanted to be a teacher from an early age – even arranging her own ‘teaching’ sessions where she would read to her friends and other children when playing. After qualifying as a teacher, Helen moved into working as a supply teacher, which she found to be an incredibly beneficial experience. Going into many different schools, usually not knowing what to expect of each class, and teaching a wide range of year-groups gave her a huge amount of experience in a short space of time. Following this period as a supply teacher, Helen taught Year 6 at the same school for 10 years but, ultimately, found that teaching full-time with two children at home became too demanding. Realising that either work or home-life would suffer, she made the decision to leave teaching.
Currently, with the coronavirus crisis, school closures and restrictions on movement have meant that parents up and down the country – Helen and Claire included – are now trying to home-educate their children. Helen shares her experiences of this, talking about some of the challenges she has faced including how her children see her as a ‘mum’ rather than a ‘teacher’, and how having two children at quite different ages has also been difficult at times in terms of differing expectations and her children’s reactions to what they need to do.
KEY TAKEAWAYS

Home-schooling is very different to teaching a classAlong with the different ‘feel’ of a school environment, teachers have classes of up to thirty children and will usually have their attention divided between all the children or across several groups. However, with teaching at home, the attention is much more focused and, as it is a parent doing the teaching, children can find this more difficult to become accustomed to. Even where the parent is a qualified teacher, children will still see you, primarily, as a parent. Along with this, children’s attention spans will be much more limited. Having ‘flexible’ routines can be beneficial here and not worrying if things don’t go to plan.
Vary the activities and be mindful of how much you are trying to fit inTrying to fit too much into each day can, ultimately, end up with things just not working as well as they might, or a sense of disappointment where time or attention runs out. Don’t worry about having to adjust your expectations in light of how things need to work for you.Also, not everything your children do needs to be fun and practical. While practical activities are usually the most entertaining and enjoyable for children, they can sometimes be the most time-consuming activities to organise and demanding to ‘run’. There will also need to be times where children complete quiet and focused tasks, and these are just as beneficial and important as the more physical activities.
Having children at different ages can bring its own challengesAs well as having to find age-appropriate activities for each child, an additional challenge can be organising your routines around individual needs. On top of that, some children, depending on the age differences, can become envious of the more practical activities the younger children might need to do. While many children will try to be considerate of this, it could be harder for some to come to terms with. One takeaway here might be to encourage the older children to re-teach or revisit the activity the younger child has done alongside them later on. That way, they will get to take part in the activity