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Advice about Teaching Children at Home During the COVID-19 Epidemic

Janice Acosta of Learning Success has posted a video of me giving advice for people who are teaching their children at home during the COVID-19 epidemic.  Chad Ream of Imaginarium Pictures in Portage, Michigan, made the video for me.  You can find this video at https://www.learningsuccesssystem.com/tips/nhs/janetruthheller

Below are some of my comments.

Children learn best when they can participate actively in the lesson.  Therefore, do not just lecture children.  Instead, ask kids questions about the topic that stimulate analytic thinking.  Push them to develop their ideas and write about their ideas.  Or take the children outside and do an experiment.  For example, when I was about eight years old, our teacher asked us to form groups of two to measure our shadows outside at different times of the day.  I have never forgotten that shadows grow longer as the sun gets lower in the sky, either in the east or the west.  This brings science to life.

homeschooling photo
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Janet Ruth Heller

I am the past president of the Michigan College English Association. I have a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. I have published four poetry books: Nature's Olympics (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Exodus (WordTech Communications, 2014), Folk Concert: Changing Times (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012) and Traffic Stop (Finishing Line Press, 2011). My scholarly book, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama, was published in 1990 by the University of Missouri Press. My fiction picture book about bullying for children, How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Arbordale, 2006; 7th edn. 2022), has won four national awards. My play The Cell Phone won fourth place in a national contest and was performed twice at the Fenton Village Players One-Act Play Festival on June 24-25, 2011 in Fenton, Michigan. Triton College produced another play, Pledging, as part of its Tritonysia Play Festival in May 2017. Choeofpleirn Press published Pledging in Rushing Through the Dark (2022).