"Homeschooling" During Quarantine

When Covid-19 began to spread across Japan, most schools were advised to close tentatively, hence an early spring vacation for the kids. The school in Japan where I teach had no classes since first week of March while my son’s kindergarten announced school closure in mid-March.

We spent the first weeks following the closures just relaxing at home, watching movies and series on Netflix. My husband introduced my son to online games which they would spend hours on.  Little did we know that the vacation would go on for longer.

Feeling unproductive, I encouraged my son to join me in setting up our own "homeschool" where we would do crafts and learn katakana and hiragana.  He got excited and immediately joined me drafting our homeschool schedule and activities.

Initially, we had our homeschool class in the morning but we found it more effective to do it starting at 2 o'clock in the afternoon.  We set up his room with a desk and a chair.  I prepared a small bag where he would put his notebook, coloring materials, scissors, pencils, erasers, and other things we may need for craft time.  We would even change from house clothes to outside clothes so we would not feel lazy and get into school mode.  It was fun role-playing/ learning bonding for us and we were able to utilize our time in a more productive way.

Since he was more familiar with hiragana, we made it as our starting point.  I made flashcards for him and used it to teach him the sounds of each character.  Then we moved on to tracing and writing the characters, using the worksheets I printed from online sources.  I asked my son to sound out the characters as he writes them for better retention.  Each day, we would work on one group.

The first few characters specifically the あ、い、う、え、お  group were challenging to write but he later on got the hang of it and was able to successfully learn and write it.  My son said hiragana was fun to write and his favorite was ぬ.  Ironically, I found it the most difficult one.

After finishing the hiragana set in 10 days, we had a review then moved to katakana.  As opposed to curvy hiragana characters, katakana characters are mostly linear.  And since there are characters that look alike, my son had a more challenging time distinguishing them, particularly these ones シ and ツ,  タ, ク and ヌ, and  ン and ソ.

But although it was challenging, we were able to successfully finished all of it.  Learning it during the quarantine months made him more confident in reading Japanese words and it also prepares him for when they would study hiragana and katakana in school.

Also part of our homeschool are the crafting activities that were thematic and aligned with the events / celebrations during that time.  I am very happy with the koi nobori we made, as well as the artwork we made for Mother's Day.  Credit to Pinterest for the ideas.

When classes in our respective schools resumed, we temporarily closed our "homeschool".  But we are happy to open it again for some crafting activities, review of Japanese characters, or whatever fun activities we want.

How did you and your kids spend your time during the quarantine months?