Innovative lessons perfectly suited for the home

Easter holidays may be just beginning, but for the vast majority of students across the country this will be the third week they have been at home because of the corona virus lockdown. Parents have suddenly been thrown into the role of academic teachers for the 8 million children, whose homes have now become their schools. School teachers are still working hard to set tasks for their pupils every day, to ensure their learning continues throughout the following weeks, and possibly months. Along with continuing with their core academic subjects, there are a number of other activities that students can partake in during this period of lockdown

Every home is actually a great learning resource in itself. A fun and instructive task might be for a student to map out a scale plan of their room. By measuring the lengths and angles of the walls, they will be able to draw out an accurate floor plan, to which can be added further details, such as the position of windows, doors and furniture. Such a task as this will be highly educational, for it will encourage the visualisation of a room in an entirely new manner, while providing insight into how architects carry out their work. A more ambitious student might extend their drawing to all the other rooms of the domicile, with the finished floor plan providing them with an all-encompassing layout of their home. Such an activity, which will certainly take some time to complete, will be a novel and valuable form of education.

Another home lesson would involve cataloguing some of the plants in the garden. If the pupil doesn`t have access to a garden of their own they might be able, depending on lockdown conditions, to carry out this task in a local park. Using a measuring tape the student can map out a three or five metre square area that has a plentiful variety of different plants. They can then take a photograph - with their own phone, or perhaps with a supervising adult`s - of each plant, and note its location on a drawn representation of the square patch of ground. After returning home they can then attempt to ascertain the name of each plant by consulting a horticultural website. A brief description of each plant should be composed, along with certain key features. Spring is the perfect time of year to be carrying out such an activity, as there are an abundance of beautiful flowering plants showing at the moment. This activity could be repeated in a few weeks, and the pupil can note the change in the number of plants in the same area, along with their seasonal development. Advanced activities could involve measuring the sunlight in different areas using a phone app, and seeing if greater light promotes a wider variety of plant species.
This activity covers a wide range of academic disciplines, including botany, ecology, geography and biology. Depending upon the age and receptivity of the pupil to the task, they can learn about plant reproduction, photosynthesis, along with aspects of farming and agriculture.

This is the perfect time for pupils to study home economics. In many households children routinely take part in the running of the household, but for others this will be a great opportunity to learn about this subject. Depending of course upon the pupil`s age, they can be taught about cooking in the kitchen, cleaning, and laundry. Too many adolescents leave home to attend university, without possessing even the most basic knowledge in this area. This period of lockdown is an apposite moment to teach children the basics of how a household runs. From good food storage, including which produces can be frozen, and which are perishable and cannot be stored for long, to waste disposal and recycling, an attentive student will soon come to understand the management of a household.

It is likely that primary and even many secondary school children will have little knowledge of the subject of meteorology, so now is the perfect time to teach them about different weather features. They could be tasked with learning the ten different cloud formations, and then asked to identify the clouds outside. From the tornado alley in the central United states, to the sand storms in the middle east, pupils can learn about the prevalence of certain weather features in different areas. This is a topic that covers a broad range of subjects, including geography, physics, chemistry, and agriculture.