A new school year is almost here. If your children attend school outside your home, have you ever thought about what would happen if their school was closed for an extended period of time?
The most likely to occur disastrous events don’t have a long duration before order begins to be restored. Natural disasters can be devastating, but most are relatively localized and the response and recovery time is a couple weeks to a month at the longest. Your children might miss some school, but the time is usually made up at the end of the year or possibly by extending the school day.
Think Katrina
But every now and then a major event happens, like Hurricane Katrina, that disrupts entire geographic areas and devastates schools.
Katrina completely destroyed 110 of 126 New Orleans public schools, displacing more than 60,000 students. A year later, the school system was only able to accommodate the return of half the students. It is estimated that more than 400,000 students in the Katrina ravaged regions had to move to other cities to attend school.
Another issue is pandemic. Experts believe that it could take at least 4 to 6 months to prepare a vaccine for distribution during a flu pandemic.
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Schools have varying response plans for outbreaks. Some close as soon as an outbreak has been identified. Others will not close until the school itself has a certain percentage of confirmed illnesses. Either way, schools could be closed for months to help reduce transmission rates. Depending on the time of year and how long schools are closed, recommendations could be made to hold all students back until work is made up or promote them all as if they completed the current grade. Neither is a good option.
Homeschooling Your Public School Children
If you find yourself post-disaster with school-aged children at home for an extended period of time, you will likely need a way keep them occupied. You may also want to continue their education so they don’t fall behind.
If they have their school books with them, you can simply progress through each subject as if they were attending school. Have your children read the text, work in workbooks, and take chapter quizzes and tests. If there are no tests, create them by reading through the text yourself.
Maintain good notes on what the student accomplishes each day and keep a copy of all finished work. This will provide proof that your child has successfully completed missed curriculum and could prevent him from being held back a year. If the students are promoted to the next grade automatically, you will be confident that there won’t be any learning gaps because they did the work.
Online Resources
There are other study options whether your children have their school textbooks or not. Assuming you have power and an internet connection (for example, in a pandemic scenario), there are no limits to the education that can be provided to your kids. You can enroll your children into full-time online schools like Freedom Project Education, K12 Online Public Schools or Connections Academy, Time4Learning, or Easy Peasy.
If you’re looking for specific courses, here are some of our family favorites:
Math, Science, Computing, Test Prep and more: Khan Academy
Science: The Happy Scientist
Writing: Young Writer’s Program
Spelling and Vocabulary: Spelling City
Current Events: Student News Daily
History: Have Fun with History
Multiple Topics: BrainPop
This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to teach your children at home using a computer, it will be easy to find the curriculum you need. (These are also great resources for your children to use ANY day!)
Let’s assume though that for whatever reason you won’t have your children’s textbooks at home, you don’t have internet access, and you are looking at weeks to months of educating your child yourself. What should you have in your home to prepare for such a time?
