For parents: setting a daily learning schedule for learners ages 2-7

Hi everyone! If you're already here for the Structuring the Day webinar from Khan Academy Kids, thank you so much for joining. We're going to get started in just a minute when folks have had time to join. Thank you!

Hi, my name is Sophie, and I'm from the Khan Academy Kids team. Thank you so much for joining today for our parent webinar on structuring the day and how some of the Khan Academy Kids resources and tools and support center can help you keep your days moving with your little ones at home. I want to take this moment to say thank you so much to our sponsors, Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, and Novartis for helping us provide this support during school closures. We are so grateful, and I want to just acknowledge all of you parents, carers, grandparents, and maybe some teachers who have joined today. You're taking the time to figure out ways that you can make your days maybe a little bit more structured, maybe meet some more of your goals, and we're so grateful that you're turning to Khan Academy and Khan Academy Kids at this time.

I am Sophie Turnbull; I'm from the Khan Academy Kids team, and today I'm really excited to be joined by two of my friends and colleagues, Vicky Lang and Dan Too, and they are both on the Khan Academy team. Today, our big objective is to make sure you know where to go to find tools to help you structure your day and achieve your goals during this school closure period. We've got a bunch of free resources, and we've got our expert Vicky joining to give us some tips and tricks. I think this will be really helpful for parents who are thinking about ways that they can help keep their children learning throughout school closures.

We won't cover in detail how to get set up on Khan Academy Kids, how to download the app, and set up a profile for your child, and we won't cover specific advice for teachers. That is all really important stuff, and if you go to the handout that is linked in this webinar, you'll see that on the learning objectives page we have linked to the getting started guide and to the teacher guide, and if that's what you're looking for, then I'd encourage you to check those resources out.

What we will cover is a quick overview of the Khan Academy Kids resources, and then we'll spend most of our time hearing about this idea of structuring our day, and we'll hear from a pro on how to do this. We're going to turn it over to you. I want to spend at least 10 minutes of today answering your questions and hearing from you about what's on your mind as you try and structure your day with your little ones.

Khan Academy Kids is a part of Khan Academy, but it's a separate app. It's a mobile app and it was designed particularly for children ages two through seven. Just like Khan Academy, it's completely free; there are no ads, there are no subscriptions in the app. It is a really rich and educational and also entertaining experience for your two to seven-year-old. It has a range of activities; we built it with Head Start, so it has a lot of the academic and non-academic activities that are really useful for getting your preschooler, kindergarten, first grader ready to go on and succeed at school. So it includes math and reading, also things like telling the time and life skills like getting dressed.

It has a huge social emotional learning aspect to it, things like understanding emotions and expressing frustration, which I think is really important during this time. It also encourages children to get up and move around, to draw a picture for a friend, and get creative. It is so much more than just drilling the hard academics, and that's what we hear from parents, and that’s what they really love during this time of school closures.

We have had, think about, and we've talked to parents about what they're finding useful, and one piece of feedback has been, "The app is amazing, but I'm just really struggling to structure my day. How much time should we spend on Khan Academy Kids versus playtime or doing other things that are so important throughout the day? And how on earth do I get any work done in this mind-bogglingly confusing time?"

One thing that we have come up with at Khan Academy is a set of schedules that just gives you a recommendation, a guide, a starting point that educators and parents alike came together and helped to form that says maybe you could structure your day like this. So on this page in your handout, you'll see a template for the daily schedules; they are the Khan Academy schedules, and they go right from preschool right through to the end of high school. So if you've got a child of any age and you're listening to this webinar, they'll be helpful for you.

We've also included this more guidance link, and that is the Khan Academy Kids team has added some very visual and fun schedules specifically for children ages two through seven. If you're looking for something where you can actually engage and build a schedule with your child, then I'd encourage you to have a look at those extra examples from Khan Academy Kids.

We put these schedules out having heard that they were important, but we could not have prepared ourselves for the feedback that we got from parents. You know, one of my favorite quotes is a parent who says, "I just got teary-eyed reading the Khan Academy schedules." You know, these are fantastic! Parents just saying that it has really helped them to get some degree of normalcy back into their day.

So I really want as many of you all to access these schedules. We'll be sharing the handout, and you'll be able to click on those links and check them out. But what I thought would be really important was to acknowledge that they won't just work as is for everyone. I wanted to invite my friend at Khan Academy, who is an incredible parent, educator, and child development specialist. I'll let Vicky tell her story, but I'd love for Vicky to share with you some tips about how you can really use these schedules as one tool that might help you structure your day and some other important things that you can keep in mind as you're doing that. So, I'll hand over to Vicky.

"Yeah thanks, Sophie! What a wonderful introduction and what a wealth of fantastic resources you all have put together at Khan Kids! I just, my six-year-old loves it; it's so fun! So yeah, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the specific schedules that we’ve put together at Khan Kids and the bigger principles. Like what are some things to think about as you're structuring the day for a young child, especially if you are also trying to get work done at the same time, because we are all living that myself right now, all trying to do 1700 things at once.

Before I launch into that, just a little bit about who's talking to you. I'm the learning scientist at Khan Academy. I help all of the teams understand how learning works and how to design for it. I've been doing learning design for a long time. First as an elementary school teacher and then in ed tech, and I am a parent myself. I'm a single parent of a six-year-old, so I have a lot of practice. She's in kindergarten, a lot of practice doing two things at once, and I'm living this currently of her kindergarten being closed and trying to figure out how to structure this day for her while also continuing to try to do my job.

So let's look at what some of these key principles are of what we're trying to do when we're structuring the day for a kid and why you would want to put structure on it at all. If we can go to the next slide—can we go then slide? Thanks! Oh, sometimes it freezes up. I know that feeling; that's a terrible feeling!

So what we're trying to do, the real goal of trying to think through structure, is to create a space where kids feel safe and secure so that they can learn and you can work. Safety and security are good, especially in an uncertain time like we are right now. And then it's also true that kids who feel safe and secure learn better; their brains are more ready to learn, and they're also better able to play independently when it's time to play independently, so that you can get your work done. So it's kind of a win-win all around. And that's going to help you to be able to get even just a few hours of work done, or not, if you're not working. Either way, it's still good for the kid to know what to expect throughout the day.

And then hopefully, by the end of the day, we can all go to bed still liking each other and getting along reasonably well by the end of the day, even in this stressful time. So the big ideas to keep in mind because, as Sophie said, every family is different and what works for one family isn't going to work for another, so I want you to be able to modify the tools that we're providing to work for your specific situation. And as you do that, I want you to know what are the big ideas that I want to keep in mind going forward as I make changes.

First, clarity and communication are really helpful for kids. When kids know what to expect and what's expected of them, that helps them feel confident. It helps them feel like they are empowered to act independently and they can trust that it's going to work out because they know what's expected of them. When they know what to expect, they come to trust the world as a safe and reliable place, so having that clarity of a list of this is what's gonna happen throughout the day, and we're going to stick to this, and if it changes, I'm going to talk with you about that and partner with you about that so that the kiddo is just aware of what's going on for them, that really helps them feel secure.

Connection is also really important. Connection with any trusted adult is an important part of security for kids; they constantly need that connection cup refilled. This is when you start to see attention-seeking behaviors, and it can be really helpful to reframe them as connection-seeking behaviors. That kid is wondering, like, are you not just in the physically present in the room, but are you really able to attend to them, really see them, and hear what they need and be available for them, even just for a brief moment?

Connection can be really hard, especially when we are managing so many different things and also trying to work, and our kids don't understand why we're home but not able to be with them all the time. So connection is something that's lost and re-established many times a day in any family, and sometimes it's taking a break to go be with them on part of their schedule, and sometimes it's just as we do a lot of staring contests at my house, just a quick minute—let's reestablish eye contact. I really see you; I'm really here with you. I'm going to give you like a—not a half hug while I look at my laptop, but a turn to you, like a real hug just for a second before I go back to work! That can really help that kid feel more secure.

And then choice is another big idea that helps kids develop a sense of self, positive self-control, and autonomy. It gives them practice with planning. It helps them understand that they can make a plan and they can carry it out, and they can feel successful with that if we give them just a manageable number of options and set them up for success. So that's going to support their development and their executive functioning skills as they grow, and it creates ownership, which means the kiddo is more bought in and more engaged and more motivated to do what they need to do during the day because they had a little bit of choice in when they're gonna do it and exactly what they're gonna do.

So those are the big ideas that I recommend trying to build into a schedule. That said, everybody is in just chaos right now, and so you're doing great. Whatever you're doing is great. These are just some things to try to carry forward.

So let's look at, and this—sorry—if you can go back for just a second. This picture on the right—this is my daughter, and you can see choice there. This is our schedule that she's standing on, and then she's got activity carts there, and she's thinking about where she wants to put her cards during the day, and so this is something that we do every morning at breakfast. But you're going to be able to figure out what works for you and your family.

Looking at the next slide, what might actually go in your schedule? You know, it depends on how much time you have and what your school has provided for you, and it's going to vary depending on what you're able to do. But if you look at a typical early childhood classroom or a preschool classroom, these are the topics they'd be trying to cover: reading and writing, that should say writing, some math—we have both of those in Khan Kids; it's fantastic—social time with other kids, even if it's on video with a playdate or with adults, free playtime where they can be creative and get some large motor practice and small motor practice, and science and social studies.

Are you going to be able to do all those every day? No, I'm not able to do all those every day! Like there's a reason teaching and parenting are two different jobs, and we don't have people ordinarily that are full-time parents and full-time teachers. You're not going to be able to do that, and give yourself some grace and patience. But we're all doing the best that we can. If you can go to the next slide, we'll look just briefly at the examples of some of the things—this is a sneak preview of what's coming for you on Friday with through Khan Kids.

So there's a couple different structures: one is the written one; there's an option on the left where you can write in the times that work for you, activities. There's activity cards and there's a space where you can write in the name of the grown-up or you could just write independent if it's independent time. That might be with that kiddo because then the kiddo knows it's easier for them to play by themselves for a half hour if they know when you're coming back. And then there's an option on the right if you don't have the time or space to invest in that level of connection, then there's a version that's just for your kiddo to fill in their activities, and you can pre-fill it if you want to be consistent every day and limit the number of choices—whatever works for you.

If you look at the next slide, I think there are some examples here of how that might look. We do things like read on video chat with Grandpa while I get an hour of work done every day; that's something that's helpful. Or you can just fill in free, kind of pre-filled activities. And then on the next slide—this is my last example—is the visual schedule for younger kids who can't read yet and don't understand time yet. We've provided these pictures where you can kind of build—there's a blank template or there's a pre-filled schedule, and you can fill in what's going to work for you. And you can even—young kids can have choice in where they put different things to whatever extent you're comfortable with.

And with that, I will turn it back over to Dan, who's going to say just a little bit more about where to find these resources, and then we'll take questions.

"Hi, thank you, Vicky, and thank you, Sophie! I just wanted to cover off a few things before we get to resources and open it up to live questions. First, attached to this webinar, we have a handout section, so please grab and download the version of this presentation. It contains a complete walkthrough of what Vicky and Sophie walked you through in terms of how to structure your schedule, why it's important, and what content to incorporate into your schedules. It also has links to resources like live activities, including circle time, which we recently spun up on our Khan Academy Kids YouTube channel, as well as printables.

So if you want to do things offline, these are really important activities that the team is working on creating for you as well. And then, as always, you know, we have a list of other resources available for you both at Khan Academy as well as khanacademy.org/kids—that's where our main Khan Academy Kids pages live. And if you have any questions, feel free to email conkids@khanacademy.org if you have any questions.

And the second thing we'd ask you to do is if you have any questions, please add them to the question box. I'll be facilitating while Vicky and Sophie do the hard work of actually answering the questions.

Alright, so we already have quite a few questions—really good questions coming in. I'll start off, Vicky; this one's probably for you from Senthil. This is a funny one: Are we sure we can have a timetable for a two-year-old? That's where the picture one comes in!"

"That's a great question! So kids that young, you're right, don't understand time; it's too abstract, but they can understand sequence. So we're having snack now; that means next we're going to read a book, and next we're going to do nap. So having just the order of things can help kids to understand what's first, next, and last."

"And then we have a question from Carrie. Actually, I can chime in a little bit before I pass it off to either of you. So Carrie asks, you know, I'd like to know any tricks on how to get a six-year-old to enjoy reading, either by someone else or by himself as he learns to read. I read with my nieces and nephews as they were growing up throughout all the ages, and the way I've done it that's worked for me is we'll take turns reading like a little paragraph or a sentence and often acting out the character or just like enunciating and just playing along with it just beyond the page. It's been really helpful for me, and so Sophie or Vicky, if either of you'd like to provide your own tips there."

"Yeah, I think reading with a variety of adults can be exciting. My daughter's much more excited to read to her grandmother than she is to read to me. Another thing that can help is sometimes as parents, we're really excited for them to try to learn, and we can push them a little bit. I know I tend to fall into that sometimes, and if we back up and just let them go at their own pace, give them room to make mistakes, give them wait time while they're sounding something out—just let them take their space and slow down. That can make it feel like a lower-pressure activity for them, and they can be more excited to engage in it. And the little bit that I would add is that the Khan Academy Kids app has a whole library of thousands of books; a lot of them are our own original characters, so there's five really happy animal characters, and some of them are about nature, and you should really check those out too."

"Perfect! And then, Sophie, this one's probably best for you. Gold asks, is there a way to access Khan Academy Kids through a browser? I have two kids, but only one mobile device for them to use."

"Yeah, the short answer is no. The Khan Academy Kids app was built for really little fingers, so it's designed to be on a mobile device that can be manipulated, and so it works on a Chrome touchscreen but not on the typical desktop browser experience. That's something we would love to build, and I'm really glad you've asked that question. I guess in that scenario, I would say maybe having one child take a look at Circle Time, which is available in-browser because it's hosted on YouTube, and that's a 15-minute or so reading and interactive activity that's supposed to really represent that Circle Time that kiddos have in preschools and schools all over the country. And then maybe using some of our printables if you have a printer at home; we've also adapted them if you don't have a printer at home. There are some offline activities that maybe your child could get excited about. And thanks so much for laying out that scenario that you've got. I'd definitely love to take it onto desktop someday!"

"Yeah, I would just echo what Sophie just said. The team's developing a tremendous amount of resources that are off the app as well. Sophie’s one of the stars of Circle Time, so you get to see Sophie repeatedly visit there as well, and then the printables are just adorable. So I think that's a really fun activity that you can take offline as well."

"We have a great question from Jason, and I can start with this and then probably pass it over to you, Vicky. So Jason asks, how do we navigate between this schedule and what our districts are sending us?"

"I would just echo that we created these schedules early on before any other public schedules were really made available, and so we were developing it to fill a void that we saw that was a need. And obviously, we don't want to conflict with what your districts are advising for you, so I just kind of give that background before I hand it over to Vicky."

"Yeah, that's a great point, and I would just say that different schools are doing different things, and you can fill in, if you're working within one of those blank templates where your child has some choices, you can just fill in the fixed things, right? Just write in nine o'clock Circle Time with class, before you even give them the sheet. We do that here; I fill in like where I have a work meeting and I'm not gonna be available to be with her, so she knows she can't schedule math or something during that time. So then you're just limiting the number of choices that they have based on what free time they actually have to schedule. You can also put other constraints on it, like we need to do exercise in the morning because otherwise, you are off the walls by the afternoon or math has to happen in the morning because your brain is tired at the end of the day. So just pre-filling, I think, is what I’d say."

"Okay, perfect! This next question, Sophie, perhaps you can answer this one. Does Khan Academy also provide suggestions on physical activity?"

"Physical—you know we have a physical development section, so if you can kind of dive into that, that would be terrific."

"Thanks, Sophie! Yeah, I think a really big part of the Khan Academy Kids app is that we recommend that it's used for 15 or 20-minute sessions at a time, and we really don't see kids getting stuck in it because we bring them out of the activities to do something physical. So an example might be we get them to act like zoo animals, and that's always a really fun time where they go from manipulating something or reading something to you to actually getting up and moving around. I think the app actually prompting physical activity, I think, throughout the app there's just a great emphasis on getting outdoors, on moving around, and having adventures, and so treating Khan Academy Kids as a good role model for that and using it in a really balanced way is one way that we see kids being really physical. We just saw these amazing tweets this week of kids dancing around, and they created forts and they were talking to the characters, and you know there's just so much theatrics that goes on with early learning, and I think the app really encourages that."

"Awesome! So, kind of related to this one, it’s asked quite frequently right now, so I'll just kind of ask on behalf of everyone else, and actually, I can chime in here as well. There are many questions about how to regulate or think about screen time, especially in a time like this. So, Sophie or Vicky, do you want to volunteer? And I can chime in."

"Sophie, do you want to start, and I have a couple of ideas?"

"Yeah, happy to start. So the number one principle for the Khan Academy Kids creators, who are parents themselves, has always been that parents really know best, and parents and carers are the best place to come up with a balanced, very nutritional media diet—some like to call it—for their children. We really defer a lot to the guidelines of the experts—people like the World Health Organization and the American Association of Pediatrics—on screen time, and that's why we recommend that 20 minutes a day mark for our two to seven-year-old learners. It obviously can be flexed up for the older ages, and really that's what we tend to see is working for families as Khan Academy Kids becomes just one part of a very balanced day that, to Vicky's point, has a lot of free play and a lot of outdoor time ideally, and a lot of movement."

"Yeah, and I think that there are different ways of using screen time. I think that there's more and less educational ways in this day and age, and there's also more and less social ways. It may be the only way that your child can get social time with other kids their age, which is an important part of a kid's development. So that's something to think about as you're figuring out what feels right for your family. One of my favorite tips as you're trying to limit screen time, coming from having been a single parent raising a toddler, is podcasts. Podcasts serve almost the same sort of like kid entertaining function while you need to do the dishes that a screen sometimes can without the screen, so there are some fantastic educational podcasts around science, there are some for the really little ones, there's some really good storytelling podcasts out there, and if you have one of those home speakers that listens to your voice, the child can actually play it for themselves. It's just like robot play stories podcast, and it will do that, and that has been very helpful and supportive for me as I try to do more than one thing at the same time and still want her brain to be growing."

"Yeah, and I think part of the reason why the Khan Academy Kids team does such a— is so thoughtful about creating these additional resources, whether it's Circle Time, physical activities within the app as well as the printables—is really to provide a mix of activities for you all, and then to Vicky's point about screen time being a social activity, I think you know with the shelter-at-home mandates many of us are using screen time as a way to communicate with our families remotely. So just think about screen time; also, not all screen time is created equal and to also create a balance of a mix of activities for you to use."

"Okay, with that, I think we're almost out of time, so I think that's all we have for questions. I'd like to close out with a couple of things. First, Sophie and Vicky, thank you for sharing your expertise today! And then I wanted to thank our fabulous audience for taking the time out of your evening to be with us. We know you're extremely busy, and we appreciate you investing your time with us in this session. If you missed something or if you want to go back and review, for those of you who registered for this webinar, you'll automatically be emailed a copy—a recording of this video—and for those of you who may not, or you know of other people who would be interested in watching what you just saw and get access to those resources, well this recording will be posted and made available online.

Additionally, we have quite a few resources on khanacademy.org as well as khanacademy.org/kids specifically for younger learners, and we're updating those resources daily, so be mindful that you can come visit those pages and you'll see the updated versions pretty much every day. And then before we sign off, we do want to ask you to do us one more favor and take the poll that pops up at the very end of this webinar, and we want to know two things from you: first, how can we make this future iteration of this session even better for other parents? And then secondly, what kind of session would you like to see next from us? In fact, this session was actually a product of feedback we heard from you all; our first section was a very high-level overview, and many of you asked for more structure and more tips, and that's what this was meant to do. And so we're continuing to listen to you, and we're here to support you, so please provide us with that feedback.

In closing, we all of us recognize that you're juggling a lot as parents here. You know, this is really uncharted territory for all of us, and we here at Khan Academy just want to remind you to be kind to yourselves. It's okay; you know, we're all in this together, and you've got this! So with that, from all of us at Khan Academy, thanks again and good night!"