Did you use to rue the days that you felt like an underpaid and undervalued taxi driver for your kids? Getting your children from school to their activities while remembering healthy snacks and water bottles was exhausting. However, in the span of a year, we went from being overstretched with booked day planners to twiddling our thumbs at home. Your kids may be quite literally bouncing off the walls, and requests for snacks never seem to end. Grocery shopping has become a weekly highlight for the opportunity to chat with a person outside our ‘bubble.’
No matter how much you may have cursed the plethora of extracurricular activities, it meant that your kids’ brains and bodies were left tired at the end of the day. We are here to show you some extracurricular lessons and activities your kids can do entirely online.
Cooking Courses
As parents, our role is to develop our children to become self-sufficient and engaging adults, and part of that responsibility is encouraging basic life skills like cooking. Online cooking courses can be fun for you and the kids to take part in together. Companies like Tiny Chefs offer virtual classes for children from three to 12 years of age.
Exercise Classes
PE With Joe is a massive hit in the U.K., and the popularity of Joe Wicks swept around the world as parents struggled to keep their kids active during the initial stages of lockdowns. The Body Coach is still going strong. YouTube also has numerous other free online exercise classes geared towards kids like Cosmic Kids Yoga for younger audiences and Yoga With Adriene for Virtual Learners.
Music Lessons
We asked the teachers at LVL Music Academy in Singapore what they thought was the best aspect of teaching piano and other instruments online. They mentioned that unlike in-person lessons, online lessons are often recorded so that students can refer back to them throughout the week as they practice. Kids can also use their own instruments in their home environment, making them feel more at ease and ready to learn.
Special Interest
Whether you’re young or old, we are all more likely to learn a new skill if we find the subject interesting and engaging. One of the best things to come out of the current pandemic is the variety of online special interest courses in almost every subject imaginable. Farts, Farts and MORE Farts! is one of the most popular science lessons on Outschool that has been taught to over six thousand learners to date. There are courses for kids of all ages, from classes to improve social skills to the basics of multiplication or how to learn the parts of speech using Minecraft.Once you have done a few virtual classes, you might surprise yourself to find that some kids flourish with online learning. When the world settles into a new routine, you may find that a blend of in-person teaching and online learning works best for your child, your family, and your mental health.