How we do screen time, plus How we homeschooled today #10

Coral reefs, percentages, and Morse code

Apr 28, 2023

It’s long—scroll straight to the bottom for our daily list of how we homeschooled today!

A reader asked about educational videos. The first thing to say is, we rarely use videos for education.

Educational videos only seem to work for us if I sit with the children, pause the video every few minutes, and make sure they understand what’s going on. I find a lot of videos aimed at children go way over their heads, often because the narrator talks too fast, too idiomatically, and with too many sound effects which are intended to make it fun but actually make it very difficult to follow. So when we watch something to learn, we will often choose something not designed with children in mind.

For example, we had a great time last year learning about plastic pollution and The Ocean Cleanup. There are lots of videos on the website about how they are clearing up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as well as preventing plastics in rivers from reaching the sea in the first place. Great stuff, and really informative, so long as an adult is on hand to pause the video and make sure everyone knows what’s going on. The pausing and talking definitely seems to help retention rates too. Sitting and watching is, alas, too passive to be truly educational.

But on an almost daily basis, after lunch, we use screen time as switch off time. Each child can choose 20 minutes of whatever they want, so they get 40 minutes most days. The timing is because when they were little and eventually dropped their afternoon naps, I was desperate for a guaranteed time in the day when I could abandon them on the sofa and have some time to myself. With hindsight, I sometimes wish I had instigated ‘quiet time’ instead of TV time to fill the nap gap, but I didn’t, and 40 minutes out of their 13 hour days isn’t the end of the world.

The regular time does have advantages. They pretty much never ask for television at any other time. They don’t whine for it in the morning or beg for TV when they’re eating their tea. They don’t usually ask for ‘just one more’ episode. And if we’re having a particularly long morning, I know I can look forward to some guaranteed peace and quiet after lunch.

We did recently make one small tweak. They used to rush through lunch and claim they were full because they were so desperate for TV, which drove me mad. Then I heard the Lazy Genius has a house rule that her family tidies the living area before the TV goes on. We have adopted this practice, so now the children clear their plates away and tidy up the morning’s mess. This has had several effects. They don’t rush lunch because they’d only be rushing to get to the tidying bit. In fact they’re so keen to avoid the tidying that they often don’t ask for TV for some time after lunch, which is fine by me. They don’t complain about the tidying because they know it’s in a worthwhile cause. And the sitting room is a much nicer place to spend the afternoon and a much easier place to reset for the evening.

(I know, this is not rocket science. But it’s taken me nearly five years to work it out, so maybe it can help someone else too. Also as I write this the sitting room is a disaster because today I really needed a break and sometimes tidiness isn’t the most important thing.)

So that’s our TV routine. They can watch whatever they want, within reason of course. This is often utter rubbish like Paw Patrol, but the programmes I actually approve of are…

Magic School Bus
Octonauts
Puffin Rock
Numberblocks and Alphablocks
Ada Twist Scientist
Daniel Tiger (based on Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood, and very sweet for little ones)
Dinosaur Train
The Julia Donaldson adaptations
Bluey (especially for the fortune cookie, which reads: Flowers may bloom again, but a person never has a chance to be young again. I find this a useful thing to say to myself on certain days…)

We like watching the occasional David Attenborough documentary, with lots of pauses. And I recently discovered The Kids Should See This, which is a huge selection of videos on every subject, usually made for adults but great for children too. We watched a clip of a fossil being unearthed, a time-lapse video of a seed growing into a mango tree, a PBS video about how mangroves in Florida are adapting to climate change… there must be something for everyone.

Please leave a comment with your own recommendations!

How we homeschooled today #10

Independent reading in bed (Minotaur and Icarus - Usborne Young Reading, unavailable new but plenty secondhand)
Pancake breakfast while listening to the Magic Flute
Read about a newly-discovered coral reef in the Galapagos
I hadn’t put a Greek word for translation on the blackboard, but my seven year old found a Greek word (in this book) and translated it herself, and then worked out what ‘exodos’ means.
Played a game of The Claw (from Bluey) where I was the claw and had to grab soft toys. Cunningly segued it into a game of Nim using soft toys, and then a variation called ‘Balloon Ride’ from Family Math, trying to work out what a winning strategy might be.
Read about coral reefs in The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth and then watched a couple of videos about coral bleaching and biodiversity on reefs.
Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean but support 25% of all marine life, so we talked about percentages using a hundred square.
Did some of the activities from our latest Mysteries in Time history subscription (I really love this subscription and highly recommend it), including decoding a message in Morse code and then having a go at writing our own messages using the code.
The children played a very energetic game with friends in the garden while I did the exact opposite on the sofa.
There will be bedtime reading but I’m publishing now and then switching off!

How We Homeschool

Discussion about this post