Keeping Your Child Entertained Safely OnLine

Here are some homeschooling resources I found during Covid which I will keep using!

When home-schooling became something that was forced upon us and not something I ever expected to do, I scrambled to find resources that would support my efforts.  

Whilst the online world can fill a parent with dread of what their child may stumble upon, it also has the advantage of opening them up to a multitude of adventures that can benefit them in many ways.    

And homeschooling forced those of us, who may have described ourselves as tech dinosaurs, to explore Teams, Zoom and lots of other apps.

One of my online heroes when it comes to understanding the impact of the good and bad usage of social media is Dr. Colman Noctor.   He explains how the impact can be more subtle for children as well as how it affects their sense of well-being.  Dr. Noctor is a Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytical Psychotherapist who writes a very useful blog on his website.   I attended an offline event with him in the days pre covid as well as attending a very useful webinar he gave to our local GAA Club during the lockdown.   These types of conversations were so useful when we found ourselves trying to juggle everything and trying to keep our heads above water as parents.

So, armed with a screen time schedule in place I went in search of sites I thought may support and enhance the online school schedule.

As an emotional intelligence practitioner, myself I am only too aware of the effect of too much stimulus on our children.   

This is one of the reasons I developed an online portal for children to support them navigate their emotions.   I based it on a model of an Emotion Tree where children can click into whichever emotion on the tree, they feel they may need support with.     As well as information on the emotions, children can also click on a YouTube video that shows them how to use Emotional Freedom Technique which effectively supports us take the charge from our emotions. 

When it came to gaming, which is something that my youngest son Iarlaith has a huge interest in, I was interested in finding a site that wasn’t packed full of violent, high stimulus games.   I had also to be mindful that he was 12 and required games that stimulated him.  

One of the best sites I found was Plays.org which is a site that offers free games in all sorts of genres for children of all ages.  One of the games, Pac Rat brought me back to a time many, many years ago when I used to play Pac Man!  Iarlaith and I took turns with this one which turned out to be one of his favourite games on this site.    Pac Rat is basically a cat chasing a rat, with you having control over the rat, who is trying to gobble the cheese and it’s an extremely fun game.     

It reminds me of the film Wreck it Ralph, which I ended up writing a blog about as well.   It seems I am a bit of a geek when it comes to writing about arcade games!!!

Zombie Typing was another game he enjoyed playing on Plays.org.  

Did I have a say in encouraging that? 

Who me LOL?  

I liked the fact that he had to type in the names of the incoming zombies in order to win.  It definitely challenged him and got him to focus, which is something that I think has definitely been one of the downsides of not being at school.

Now that life has returned to our new normal, (whatever that means!) I look back and hope that the efforts I made will have in some way supported my child through the crazy time that was Covid.   

And we are still challenging each other playing Pac Rat .. but a little bit of what you fancy goes a long way, isn’t that what the experts say?!