Teaching your own children

My oldest son, Bara, was just about to finish his second year of kindergarten when his school immediately closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. One morning, his teacher wished to see me to talk about how the remaining teaching and learning process would be conducted and also how to get both Bara and I ready for distance learning. And, was I not surprised to hear that despite his almost two years of schooling, Bara was still unable to read, not even a single utterance?

The teacher later informed me that Bara always seemed to try to avoid reading while in the classroom. No matter how many times he was asked to read, he remained silent. Learning this unexpected news, I realised how much I had been disengaged from my child’s education. I never made the effort to supervise Bara’s progress in learning nor talked about the problem he faced at school. Apparently, Bara was having hard times socialising and this had affected his ability to learn at school. As a result, his academic performance was far behind others’.

Despite the news, I had a strong belief that I could reverse the situation. So, I spent the next three months teaching Bara how to read by using the books he got from school, of course starting from the very basic level. I devoted special time every single day to achieving the target that I set. To cut a long story short, Bara was finally able to read short sentences fluently after two months and short paragraphs after around four months. Monitoring his progress, I am more than proud to witness how he has become a better reader through time. Moreover, my youngest child, Aurora, who managed to get herself involved in the whole process, apparently also got stimulated and ended up being able to read herself. What a bonus!

If you are thinking teaching your own children is a daunting task, well … you are not alone. Several teachers I know also express the same views. However, if you are up to challenging the stereotype as I was, I believe there is a myriad of ways to make your teaching work. And, as a full-time teacher who has been taking the responsibility of her own two children’s education for more than a year when this article was written, I can say that teaching your own kids may require a lot more patience and stronger internal motivation than when teaching other people’s children. Still, it is possible.

Indeed, the idea of teachers teaching their own children was not new at all. It has always been there in the community. In my case, I often get reminded of this role. When you are an English teacher in a non-English speaking country like me, everyone around you seems to expect you to ace your children’s learning of English, saying that it was such an easy task as you already are a teacher professionally. To some extent, I agree with this opinion. However, just like any other parent, I believe teachers also have their struggles when it comes to teaching their own children.

I started teaching Bara and Aurora English at the end of last year. And, having been teaching them for eight months, I came to realise that teaching our own children does not require any special strategy or technique, the only thing that we need is a slightly different viewpoint. In the following, I will discuss my experience of teaching English to my own children. Please note that it was the first time ever my children, Bara (7 years old) and Aurora (5 years old), learned English and that we barely use English at home as a means of communication. Therefore, you will probably find some ideas do not apply to your situation.

The setting

Becoming a professional teacher does not make it any easier for us to teach our own children. Sometimes, the challenge is even greater. Why is that so? When we teach at school, we are bound to our duty as teachers. We feel the obligation to perform the job on a daily basis without any hesitation. On the other hand, when teaching our own children at home, we tend to see it as less important and something we do not really feel obliged to do. As a consequence, we become less motivated, less disciplined and only eager to put a small effort into trying to make it work.

To deal with this, I looked for a way to make my teaching job at home more challenging and interesting. I then came up with an idea to transform a corner of Bara and Aurora’s bedroom into our own little classroom. The ultimate goal is to enable my children to experience a learning atmosphere which resonates with what we normally have at school. So, I hung a smaller version of a whiteboard on one side of the wall, put two little tables on the other, provided board markers with different colours, and moved all our English story books in the bookshelves inside the bedroom. Additionally, in order to create a more engaging learning environment, I had colourful educational posters (pictures, vocabulary banks, reminders and schedules) tacked onto the bedroom wall.

Despite mostly being overlooked, classroom decorations are beyond visually attractive. They inspire children, stimulate creativity and imagination, enhance the learning and contribute to a positive learning environment. Surprisingly, after setting up the English corner for Bara and Aurora at home, not only did my children demonstrate a better attitude towards learning, my mood for teaching improved greatly, too.

Time management

Who agrees with me that a teachers’ workload consumes most of our time and energy? So, how can we manage to teach our own children if we are constantly facing this challenging condition? Surely, after a hectic day, teachers are susceptible to exhaustion. And, this is probably one of the reasons why teaching our children at home feels extraordinarily hard. Then, perhaps the answer is to adjust the teaching time in a way that it makes us feel most convenient.

At the beginning of my ‘home-schooling’ journey, I was determined to stick with the schedule that my children and I had agreed upon. However, as time went by, it was getting more and more difficult to simply follow the schedule. The unexpected situations such as additional paper work, school’s meetings, or even my children’s mood, happened. And, every time I attempted to force the teaching and learning process, it resulted in either me getting angry or my children acting hostile. Either way, it made all of us frustrated.

As Bara and Aurora seem to share the same characteristics, which are being easy-going and casual, I tried to apply a different approach. We changed the schedule and made it less specific. Instead of having a certain exact time written on the paper, I only wrote learning English three times a week as the weekly target. Since then, every time I am free and in a good mood to teach, I ask my children whether they fancy studying English and start the class as soon as they say yes. Giving my children freedom to make a decision of their own regarding their learning, has helped develop my children’s self-confidence and ability in decision-making.

For us, this approach has succeeded in fostering my children’s motivation to learn English. My oldest son, Bara, now even seems to more than just enjoy his learning. Several times, he politely asked me to have another English class even though we already had completed the target of the week. If you think you have a similar problem with having a fixed routine, you can take this approach into consideration. However, if everything is fine and manageable, I suggest that you maintain your fixed schedule as it will help your children learn about being disciplined.

Teaching and learning activities

Without doubt, teaching our students at school greatly differs from teaching our own children at home: the setting, the emotional relationship, the purpose, and the kinds of interactions as well as activities. Regarding the last of these, I want to have my lesson with my children as concise as those I normally have at school. That is for sure. But, with my workload as a teacher as I mentioned earlier, it mostly seems impossible.

So, what I did was try to find a teaching method that will likely to work effortlessly. And, the choice fell on the PPP: presentation, practice, production. It is simple, easy to prepare as well as to use. We surely do not need to write a full page lesson plan to teach at home.

One day, my children and I discussed prepositions, in particular in, on, between and next to. I started the lesson by presenting a video that accommodates these language features. Next, I asked Bara and Aurora to read the script of the video and helped them understand the meaning. For the controlled practice, I required them to select the most appropriate prepositions based on the contexts. As for the production, they had to write full sentences based on the pictures I drew on the whiteboard with minimum assistance from me. We learned all this in approximately 45 minutes.

The following day, I woke up to see my seven-year-old son, Bara, drawing on the same whiteboard, a television, a medal and a fan, respectively from left to right. Under the pictures, there was a sentence that read ‘the medal is between the television and the fan.’ I was surprised by how quickly he had grasped the new sentence structure, how he had managed to retain the new knowledge, and surely, how he had demonstrated a self-directed learning competence, regardless of the simple method I applied.

I use PPP in most of my teaching at home. Nevertheless, to avoid boredom, I also give variation to my classroom activities such as playing an English vocabulary game by following the principle of TPR (total physical response) method, singing English songs (I do a great deal of this with my children), and doing a simple reading to boost their comprehension of an English text. Moreover, to introduce them to the good use of digital technology, I also designed a special lesson at weekend in which both Bara and Aurora can play English games with the help of various learning platforms such as Liveworksheets, Learn English by British Council and Quizizz.

Learning media

I have always adored instructional media. I know exactly what they are worthy of and enjoy using them in every possible opportunity in my classroom. Before committing myself to teaching my own children English, I had actually bought several media to support my teaching. In my house, there are several sets of flashcards with different topics, handbooks, English story books from famous authors such as Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss, a world map, a globe, puzzles and scrabble. Not to mention the video and audio media that I downloaded from free resources on the internet.

Without question, having all these media help me conduct my teaching at home a lot easier. For example, to improve Bara and Aurora’s pronunciation, I use flashcards as a media to do a repetition drill. My children find the pictures on the cards attractive and thus becoming eager to follow the learning scenario that I set for them. Another benefit of having instructional media at home is the possibility to expand the teaching and learning process at almost any time without necessarily having to correspond with the time table. It can be used before bedtime as a replacement for bedtime stories or during family time.

Providing various instructional media is important. Equally important is knowing how to use them properly. Lately, Bara was really into studying about countries and cities across the globe. Instead of asking him to learn it from the handbook, I directed him to open the world map and started to engage him in a friendly discussion about the names of the countries and the cities written on it as well as how to pronounce them correctly. However, discussion was later expanded to talk about the people, the culture, and the food as well as the language. I helped him search the online for the information needed and helped him connect the newly gained information into a real-life context.

Apart from exposing my son to the language features, the use of media in this practice has also enabled him to learn about the context in which this vocabulary may be found, thereby making our learning a lot more meaningful. In summary, it is not solely about the media, it is what we do with it.

One afternoon, I noticed Bara and Aurora were both independently learning to read and sing the lyrics of the If you’re happy and you know it song that I had written on the whiteboard the previous day. They looked so deeply engaged and helped each other out with the pronunciation of several words in the lyric. Looking at this scene, I couldn’t help feeling fulfilled as a teacher mum. Nothing is better than witnessing first-hand the learning autonomy demonstrated by your students or children.

Moreover, as teachers, we benefit from years of teaching practice in the classroom and from all those professional development efforts during our professional career. I also believe the way each of us approaches and crafts a lesson is unique, thus making the job of teaching more personal and self-rewarding. So is teaching our own children.

Therefore, if you are thinking of starting to teach your own children at home, you do not necessarily need to follow what I have written in this article. Let’s say, why not start with the thing you favour the most? Playing a crossword game? Singing the ABC song? Watching a family favourite cartoon film? You name it. I believe as teachers you have the ability to make learning occur regardless.