Somehow, even more than usual, this school year has been fraught with a whole new host of challenges and frustrations for parents and students alike.
Especially if your kids are taking their classes fully online, the new normal that COVID-19 has created for the foreseeable future has taken a lot of getting used to for everyone. Online learning, new safety routines (and how they seem to constantly change as our understanding of the virus evolves), and even the material of the classes themselves have everyone scrambling to keep up.
These changes have gone so far as to affect the layout of our homes. Particularly for online students, home design has had to shift to help accommodate the needs of students that have to share classroom space with the kitchen, living room, or bedroom. This can lead to a lot of frustration if you don’t have a plan in place to keep things moving smoothly through the rest of the school year.
However, it’s not as difficult as you might worry it is. With a little imagination, you can easily create areas throughout your home to help your kids focus during school, and relax when the lessons are over, all without having to leave the home.
Areas Every Home Needs For Virtual Learning
Command Center
A lot of us have heard the term ‘command center’ used for home design to describe an area where important messages, notes, and mail is kept. The same concept can be easily applied to students learning from home, and it can benefit the whole family if done right.
Find a single location in your home that everyone can access – the entryway, the kitchen counter, that extra living room end table – and designate it as the command center. From there, add things like mail organizers and desk organizers to help sort paperwork and needed school supplies. Even if your kids aren’t there in person, you’ll still be dealing in physical documents like textbooks, report cards, and printed-out assignments, and setting up a command center where everyone can keep an eye on them will keep everything a little better organized. (For a little more of that at-school feeling, you can even set up kids lockers to sort things like backpacks and textbooks.)
The Classroom
Much like what everyone who worked from home has learned earlier this year, students who are taking classes at home will do much better if given a dedicated space to work from (that isn’t just the kitchen table with space cleared off for a laptop). Wherever your student winds up doing most of their work, give them their own home office desk with all the tools they may need to stay focused and productive in class. It will help your student get back into the swing of things more easily, and keep them focused on the task at hand (instead of feeling cooped up in the corner of the living room).
The Relaxation Room
We all know what a good feeling it is to come home from work and not have to worry about work anymore, right? The same goes for students, but it can be a little harder during virtual learning since you’re still at home.
Wherever you have the room for it, give your students a space to unwind and think about something else for a while after the school day ends. This can help them refresh themselves before tackling homework or any long-term at-home projects, and goes a long way towards reducing their stress about all the big changes in their lives. Take a room and stock it with things to help them relax – toys, video games, even just a giant beanbag chair to sit in for a while can help them be a little less stressed about the school day. (And that just might help everyone at home be a little less stressed!)
