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There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has led most of us to live a situation we have never experienced before.
In order to comply with the precautionary rules imposed by law, citizens who can afford it are staying home, safe from the virus, but still facing one of the many challenges generated by this pandemic: coping with kids while working from home.
If you are a parent in this exceptional situation, you’ve probably wondered how to maintain a balance between your professional and parental obligations, ensuring that working from home while having your children there doesn’t lead to a decreased performance on your side or an interruption of the learning process on theirs.
In this article, we’re giving you some key tips to help you deal with this situation.
Things to do with kids at home during the quarantine
While it may be easier for adults to bring the office home, ensuring continuity of learning and focus outside of the classroom context can be more difficult for children.
It’s no secret that children have higher energy levels than adults and tend to have insatiable curiosity. That’s why keeping them busy and interested in an activity is one of the main challenges that many parents try to overcome on a daily basis. In these times of confinement, this challenge can be exacerbated and be of greater difficulty.
In this context, it is important that the things you do at home with kids are playful activities, that capture their attention and respond to that constant curiosity. For this purpose, digital reading and writing tools can be very useful. Opting for a digital literacy solution will offer them the ability to access multiple titles covering different topics, ensuring that they get entertained with materials appropriate for any number of interests. Also, these solutions offer different content formats, whether it’s books, audiobooks, videos or magazines so that children can enjoy variety in their activities and don’t get bored in the course of the day.
Technology as the key to ensuring continuous learning
On another note, in the face of this health crisis during which classes have to be suspended, many parents are concerned with this measure’s interruption in their kids’ learning process. Indeed, the challenge is not just about keeping them busy, but also about ensuring that their minds stay active and that the learning process continues. In fact, during these challenging times in which we have to adapt our daily life in an exceptional way, experts in psychology strongly recommend maintaining, within our possibilities, a normal rhythm of life, both for parents and for children. That’s why it is key to ensure the possibility of home education for children so that they continue to develop their minds.
If you’re a parent working from home, it is probably highly difficult for you to take on the task of teaching at home. Luckily, nowadays technology allows you to delegate this task, and not to anyone… To your own child! Indeed, leveraging smart reading and writing solutions will allow your children to continue training themselves:
- using enriched materials
- interacting remotely with peers in different book clubs
- working with reading plans specifically designed for their educational development, whatever their age.
You only need an internet connection and to free up some time… For the rest, they can take care of themselves with the help of the indicated platform, letting you focus on your work. Even better, once the digital title is downloaded, they can continue enjoying it even offline.
In addition to continuing to learn at home, your children will develop their autonomy, as long as these educational solutions present an intuitive interface allowing easy navigation from any device so that they can use the tool in an enjoyable way and fully take part in their own learning.
The expansion of COVID-19 has shut us up in our homes and, as we have seen, this lockdown is likely to be more stressful for those parents who have to cope with kids while working from home. If you find yourself in that situation, do not hesitate to rely on digital educational tools that promote self-learning and autonomy so that you can comply with your professional life without neglecting the education of your children.
To ease the difficulty of balancing work from home while taking care of children, ODILO, one of the leading companies in digital education with a presence in 40 countries, has opened all its educational technology free of charge to all centers affected by school closings, whether or not they are clients of the company.