Photo courtesy of Pixy.org
Students, parents and guardians, teachers, and school administrators are struggling to get used to the new “normal” of at-home learning. While parents and guardians worry about their child’s mental health after being stuck in isolation for so long, educators are finding teaching remotely to be very different from what they were used to.
Victory Productions is trying to do its part to bridge the gap between all of these parties and their collective concerns by creating at-home lessons to supplement what the schools currently offer. Victory developed free lessons available in the areas of math, science, and social studies, some of which are available in Spanish.
Many parents and guardians often find it difficult helping their children with Algebra and other subjects. Victory provides a guardian version for most lessons to make it easier for parents and students to work together. Guardian lessons include answers to questions in the student lessons.
Victory has tried to incorporate basic tenets of learning into each at-home learning lesson. For social studies, Senior Editor Shawn Downes incorporated reading comprehension in telling stories about the flu pandemic of 1918 and how that relates to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In science, Senior Editor Morgan Turano has provided hands-on activities to keep students interested. They can perform simple experiments to understand how plants grow, or how to make a solar cooker. Students collect and record data and make conclusions.
Senior math editor Michael Avidon notes that learning mathematics in a classroom is an interactive experience, while reading a textbook is not. A teacher can ask questions, have students work in groups to solve a problem, or ask students to solve a problem on the board.
In an attempt to make these math lessons interactive in a remote learning environment, they include worksheets with fill-in-the-blank questions. The missing numbers or words are provided in the Overviews that Michael has written for the person who will be guiding the student through the lesson.
Michael suggests that parents and guardians read the overview before working on the lesson with students.
At the end of each lesson is a set of exercises in order of difficulty: standard calculations, word problems, and finally something more challenging. Parents and guardians should let students work through these on their own, and review the answers (also given in the overview) together.
All of the lessons are based on Common Core state standards, so this is material that should certainly be covered in middle school classes.
Victory Productions plans to continue to create at-home learning lessons as time allows, please check back here every so often.
