I haven’t got a timetable – what should I do?
When your child is off school, the biggest challenge is to get them to do school work. Homework is bad enough, but school work too?
What you need is a kinaesthetic timetable.
Let’s assume they are going to be off for at least 2 weeks, followed by Easter. That’s a long time to be off school, especially as some children have been off for weeks already.
You can’t have them sitting around, playing computer games and wasting this valuable learning time, so what do you do?
They first thing is to create a timetable.
And no, I don’t mean a boring chart.
I’ve done those and if your child is anything like mine, they’ll just run rings around you.
No, I’m talking about a Kinaesthetic timetable – lots of schools use them and if your child is really young they are a God send.
You can download my Kinaesthetic Timetable below.
All you need to do is print it off on plain white paper and cut out the activities.
Stick the pieces with glue stick onto the back of some cardboard. Then cut round the card leaving a border. The card I used was black hence black border. This is to make the image stiff and easier to handle. It also looks a little more decorative.
Stick some Bluetac on the back and you are good to go.
This is my daughter’s on a wardrobe door. It’s nothing fancy, but a great stress buster.
How the Kinaesthetic Timetable works
I don’t have set times for my daughter to get her schoolwork done. I’m too busy and I want my daughter to be self-motivated and proactive. So she knows exactly what she has to do all week, with English, Maths and Exercise being compulsory every day.
So she decides what else she is going to learn each day in addition to these. She also decides when she is going to do them. She tends to stagger things herself during the day, but English and maths she prefers to get out of the way in the morning. I don’t mind when she does things, as long as they all get done. Anything not done, has to be done in the evening or weekend. But she likes to keep her weekends free.
Once she’s done an activity, she moves the activity up to the appropriate time shown by the clocks.
She has to spend a minimum of 1/2 hour on each activity, but usually spends longer.
I have the tick sheet to tick off what she has done, that way I can check that she has a full week.
If she has been sitting on the computer for too long or I think she’s had a little too much screen time, I can check the timetable and see straight away what she has done without breathing down her neck all day.
This way I can ask her when she plans to do the other things rather than telling her what to do and she regulates her time herself.
If she does a good job, she gets a treat, or can collect beads / marbles which then build up to a treat.
The beauty of this is, I make sure she has a balanced week, but she does all the work herself and has control over when she does things. So there are no tantrums and fall outs.
If she spends too long on something, for example dance, then I just ban the activity for a day or two and tell her to choose something else, because she’s exceeded the time limit on it.
As we are both in control, we both win.
DOWNLOAD: Kinaesthetic Timetable and tick sheet.
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