Experts release videos to help parents teach young children at home
Posted on: 24 April 2020
A series of easy and accessible videos to help parents with home schooling have been released online. The initiative is a collaboration between Trinity, Marino Institute of Education and Clare Family Learning at Limerick-Clare ETB.
The videos, which were released on UNESCO World and Copyright Book Day, aim to support literacy at home in a simple way and are targeted at children in early primary school and their parents.
Called Literacy on the Loose, the project features seven short videos focusing on areas such as ‘Literacy in the Kitchen’, ‘Literacy on the Couch’, ‘Literacy in Nature’, and ‘Literacy on the mobile’ and give parents handy guides to integrating learning into their everyday lives – in a stress-free way.
The videos were shot by faculty members of Trinity, Marino Institute of Education and Limerick and Clare ETB from their own homes, many using their own children as subjects.
Literacy on the Loose is being led by the School of Education at Trinity and comes out of an Irish Research Council-funded project on Family Digital Literacy in partnership with NALA, Marino Institute of Education and Limerick-Clare ETB.
The project lead is Dr Ann Devitt, Director of Research in the School of Education at Trinity College and the new Academic Director at The Learnovate Centre, one of Europe’s leading research centres in learning technologies based at Trinity.
Dr Devitt said she wanted to create a series of videos to help rather than overwhelm parents who are being bombarded with online links and resources.
Dr Devitt said:
“As a result of Covid-19, parents have been thrown in at the deep end in terms of educating their children and are being asked to home school their children in a time of anxiety. Many are doing this while at the same time holding down full-time jobs – or maybe they have lost their job – and feel under pressure.
“Technology has been so helpful in terms of providing resources to parents but many feel overwhelmed by the amount of links being sent to them. We hope that these videos will lighten the load a bit. They are a guide for parents to show they don’t have to be sitting down at the kitchen table with books open to learn. The videos will help them integrate learning in a fun way into normal life.
“Many parents may find that they have already been doing some of what we are going to show them and it might give them peace of mind that they are already helping their children learn in lots of different ways.”