New Zealand’s final days in lockdown saw an Anzac Day unlike any other, cautious optimism from leaders that we have eliminated the virus, and backlash from the opposition. Video / Chris Tarpey / Mark Mitchell / Kasun Rubasinghe
COMMENT: Schools are officially back but nearly all Kiwi parents still face more weeks at home helping their children learn. Homeschooling consultant and mum Fiona Watson shares her tips and life experience on how to handle the change.
If you're struggling at home with the kids, frightened about facing even more weeks of lockdown, you are not alone. Most of us, I'm not going to lie, are finding lockdown fairly hard. Instagram can make it look pretty – but for many, it's far from a party. Now that school requirements are back in the foreground, parents are facing challenges to manage kids' daily routines and, on top of that, to comply with what can feel like never-ending expectations from schools.
This is not the first time of isolation for me. Fifteen years ago, I faced lockdown and isolation, not for a virus, but for my husband. On almost what now seems like a whim, we decided to invest everything we had into the opportunity for him to retrain to become a medical doctor at a Caribbean medical school, one of the only places we discovered he could get into as a 35-year-old with no science qualifications. So that was how I found myself in June 2004 after 30 hours of sleepless travelling through two US stopovers, a fleeting San Juan Island stopover, and finally onwards, arriving at the proudly forlorn island of Saba in the Dutch Antilles. Bedraggled but clinging to my side were four sweaty, tear-stained, incoherent wrecks – my 4-year-old, my 3-year-old, and my 11-week-old twins, to join my husband while he studied. I stared through the red slits that remained of my eyes, at the shortest runway in the world on which we had just juddered to a frighteningly jarring stop. I was in shock.
Fiona Watson homeschools her twins during lockdown. Photo / Supplied
In Saba, we were truly isolated. For two years, my range was 12 square kilometres of humidity, volcano and rainforest. One road, too steep for a pram, was our only walk. A population of 1200. We relied on a delivery of weekly supplies to the island's two grocery stores, one of which was inaccessible if my husband took the car to the school. Not that I could get all four kids into the car at once. Transporting babies, and two preschoolers up and down our steep driveway in 35C heat seemed an impossibility not worth the trip to the one playground with its one bleached plastic slide, leaning unwelcomingly against the gnarled trunk of a protesting, forgotten tree. It was 45km to our nearest "proper" supermarket should you dare to cross the Caribbean Sea on a tiny plane or the precarious, often-cancelled ferry service. More to the point, our student budget forbade it.
That was my first experience of managing in isolation, but somehow, gradually, the routine of managing my kids at their own pace, and introducing them to the joys of learning through their natural surroundings (mostly in the tired, airless kitchen or on the green chipped concrete deck of our flat with its frightening 6m drop to the ground) became weirdly addictive. It sounds unlikely, but I chose to continue homeschooling the kids through our subsequent years in the States, and even when we arrived on the shores of this island a few years later.
Now, many years later, after homeschooling my children in 100 per cent pure New Zealand, with wild and free at our doorstep, two of them have "graduated" and are now at university. The youngest (now 16) are stuck in my bubble with me in Tauranga, preparing hopefully for exams at this year's end.
Talking with other parents, some of the biggest challenges appear to be how to manage the simple things – space and time, two commodities suddenly at an unbearable premium in the average family home today.
So, to get you through another week of lockdown, here are some top tips:
• Carve out a work area if possible that does not need to be cleared up at the end of each work session. For some people, the same space needs to be available every day. Others may need to shake it up a bit. So, for example, as only two of us now have desks in our bedrooms, we accept that half of the dining room table is a designated workspace at all times, and we only ever eat on the other half. When I had younger children, and there were constant squabbles about, well, just about anything to be frank (from "She's touching my STUFF on MY SIDE of the TABLE, MUM!" to "Make her stop SLURPING at me!"), I kept a list of possible workstations. Each day, the kids chose, in order of points accumulated the day before according to how well they had performed, their workstation for the morning. The favourite spot? I kid you not, it was the bathtub, empty of course. It proved very comfortable with a cushion, had great acoustics, and allowed endless whiteboard fun on the sides of the bath.
• Carve out a work time. None of us can work endlessly at something we find less than stimulating. Our kids are no different. So, before you go to bed at night, if you haven't already done this, draft a schedule. It doesn't have to be that flash. We have often just used discarded envelopes on which to scribble. Each child should have one. And it should list their (reasonable) requirements for the next day. Younger children may only need a couple of hours in the morning for officially set schoolwork. Older children will need more. But base this on what you know your kids can manage, with lots of visible, scheduled breaks for snacks, adequate device time, a bubble walk.
Finally, remember, at the end of this, in years to come, you will still want your bubble to walk with you just for the fun of it, so don't expect any transitions to happen immediately. Go easy on yourself with pats on the back for any small achievements you have made.
• Fiona Watson has a BSc from Bristol and MA from King's College London, has been a mother for 21 years, initially homeschooling her four children after relocating to Saba in 2004, then the US, before settling in New Zealand in 2012. Her approach is to choose the best curriculum she can find, group her children together for as many lessons as possible, and to ignite each child's fire for learning. She has homeschooled her children through Cambridge IGCSEs and A levels and facilitated one child through NCEA. She is now an education consultant and continues to homeschool her twins in her bubble. You can follow Fiona on Instagram: @exceptional_homeschool
