EdTalk | The ‘Covid slide’: is lockdown causing your children’s education to fall behind, and what can you do about it?
Tutors, diaries, pen pals and reading clubs are among the ways concerned parents can address any looming skills gap brought on by the absence of in-school learning
Summer is usually a time for rest and recreation. This year, however, has felt distinctly different. Everyone has been looking ahead, wondering when, or even if, schools would reopen, hoping for a return to normalcy in the new academic year. Parents who can afford it have taken the additional step of hiring tutors and implementing at-home study regimens for their children to try and plug potential academic gaps.
There has been a growing discussion among parents of a possible “Covid slide”. This phenomenon has been attributed to, among other things, lower retention from online learning, lower efficacy of online instruction, or schools struggling to adapt to the online medium. It has also been suggested that certain skills have been particularly impacted, including long-form writing, reading and social communication.
So what can parents do about “Covid slide”?
The most important thing to do is to engage children in activities that make use of existing literacy skills and then build on them. What follows here is a variety of recommendations. See what works best for your child.
Long-form writing is likely to be among the skills that slide most. Hong Kong has many excellent resources to support literacy skills and writing. From mainstream tutors to specialists working with ELL (English-language learners) and dyslexic students, most of these instructors have either taken their services online or offer one-to-one services with appropriate coronavirus precautions.
There are also plenty of home-based activities to help boost long-form composition. Keeping a journal is an excellent activity for literacy, meta-cognition and stress relief. Though children might not appreciate it now, having a diary of their childhood experience of the Covid-19 pandemic might a be very interesting record to look back in years to come.