How did your child manage with school closures during covid?

Ana Janeva
5 min readJun 2, 2021

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The last two school years have been a big challenge for students and their parents with so much school missed due to COVID closures and absences. Some children took the online classes well, others struggled and some completely failed to engage. Now that in most parts of Germany students are slowly back at school, there are all the challenges of catching up with work missed, getting back into good learning routines and dealing with ongoing disruption.

It is a unique position for school children and their parents, since both have had to deal with extraordinary levels of anxiety and stress as a result of living through a pandemic.

There’s been much debate in the media whether school holidays should be shortened or even cancelled to make up for the lost learning time and parents have the difficult position of working out the best way to help support their children after almost a year of home-schooling.

Here is how private tutoring during the holidays can help children and parents

Most children will defintely welcome and need the summer break to help them relax and process the events of the last 18 months. But this year, more than ever before, it’s going to be important to keep up a certain amount of learning during the holidays to either help children if they’ve been struggling and have fallen behind, or to continue to support them if they’ve been doing well. With this in mind, here are some reasons why private tutoring during the summer holidays could make all the difference.

1. Close the learning gap

Each summer, we talk about the learning gap which is the loss of academic skills and knowledge over the period of the summer holidays. It’s a common occurance and shouldn’t be overestimated, since children’s brains are flexible and able to catch up very fast under normal circumstances.

But 2021 is not a normal year, and educational organisations across the globe have already expressed concern about “intensified social-emotional, as well as academic, learning loss” as a result of Covid 19.

In fact, there have been different reports published in the last few months, on their predictions of COVID-19 learning gap already. On the page of the german Fachportal-Pädagogik https://www.fachportal-paedagogik.de you can find some of them.

The main predictions show that students will return in the autumn with about three-quarters of their typical learning gains in reading and with less than half of their typical learning gains in mathematics. And that’s before you count in any additional fall back as a result of the summer holidays.

Just a few hours will make all the difference

But let’s not panic. There is positive research that shows that just a few hours of learning per week can prevent summer learning loss — and this is where summer tutoring programmes come into their own. Focusing on the core skills required as part of the school curriculum, our programmes are designed around your childs needs.

We pick up any areas where your child may need some extra help or could do with a bit more of a challenge, ensuring your child catches up in respect of any Covid learning loss as well as ensuring they don’t suffer further learning disruption as a result of the summer holidays.

The programmes are structured but fun and they also take away the need for you to do any more home-schooling.

2. Builidng your child’s confidence and helping with concerns

Confidence is everything. Without it, children can lose their motivation to learn, and can struggle to face some of the many difficulties that they have to deal with in school, whether academic or social. And once again, Covid 19 has had a massive impact on the confidence and worry levels of many children.

This interaction encourages cooperation and nurtures the discipline of respecting others, as well as helping to improve confidence. All of this helps children to manage concerns, as the start of the school term approaches.

The effect is that when children go back to school, instead of falling behind, they’ve actually progressed, and they’ll also have improved their self-confidence. And this gives them the best possible start to a new school year.

3. Supporting you getting back to work and daily routine

Whether you worked through the lockdowns, could afford a break from work or were forced to stay at home without an employment, the challenges of home-schooling, daily responsibilities with the stresses and strains of a pandemic have been remarkable. Now, parents need to get back to work and recover some sense of economic and social stability.

We’re very aware that the last thing many parents need after months of being at home, is now to have to shuffle work around the school holidays and spend precious time time trying to encourage children to do some summer schoolwork. Alternatively, you may be struggling to think of ways to entertain the children, or busy in a daily struggle of trying to get your children away from their computer games.

The truth is that holidays can be very stressful. That’s why Logo Lernhilfe wants to support families this summer with a tutoring programme, that helps by giving the holidays some structure. It allows parents to gain some time and space, and gets the children away from their computers ; giving them something fun and stimulating to do.

And yes, we do mean fun, because summer tutoring is not only about hard work! Our programmes are fun so that your children won’t even realise they’re learning as they work!

This summer we want to see our students return to school with restored enthusiasm and their parents a little more relaxed so that they have enough energy to keep up with all the challenges of the new school year.

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