Ulog #7 | I am a Nanay-Teacher

In attempts to empower parents as the schools' partners in children's education, the Act known as "Nanay Teacher Parenting Program" was submitted to the Philippine Congress. The State is to work on promoting parents to cooperate with schools, and any other educational institutions, with the aim of advancing learning at home. Among others, the objective is to align parents on the importance of their role in the education of their children.

I came across this program while I was researching about Home Schooling. When Sam was in the 3rd grade, she had to stop in the middle of the school year because of health issues. She had complete shots but because of her weak immune system, she still got ill. When she got chicken pox, we decided it was best for her to build her physical strength first. At home, we still adhered to a daily schedule and had mental exercises based on the lessons I could find in her school books. That's when I first thought about educating her at home. Red and I were torn between the advantages and disadvantages of Home Schooling, and in the end, we let Sam's health decide. When the 2017 school-year began, Sam was showing great progress health-wise. She was enrolled and was able to go through third grade with no problem. She even made it to the Dean's List, and got a medal for academic excellence at the end of the school-year.

But now that she is in 4th grade, Sam has had some challenges in school. It was quite a shocker for Red and I when we got called to school and were told that Sam's grades were dipping below average. I honestly didn't know how to feel about it at first, but later on decided that the best thing to do was focus on what we needed to improve to help Sam pull her grades up. The hardest part was to make Sam tell us what we can do to help her.. It also took her some time to admit to us that she hasn't been in her best behavior. She has been busy with her gadget, and was spending much time watching youtube videos. Once we got that out of the way, we had lots of things to do and it's one of the of the reasons why my Steemit account was on hiatus for a month.

I spent hours pouring over Sam's school books, which I did while she was at school. When she got home, we would spend two hours going back to previous lessons which she found confusing. After dinner, I would spend another two hours making reviewers and exercises that she can work on while I'm doing my other chores. Here are some of our work:

MUSIC

SOCIAL STUDIES

SCIENCE

MATHEMATICS

These definitely took a lot of time and effort. It was absolutely tiring, but part of me actually enjoyed doing those again. I used to make reviewers for Sam when she was in first grade, which was the time when she was just starting to read and needed much help from me. I re-learned loads of stuff too, like musical symbols, the art of cartography, the digestive system, and my favorite -- long division. Sam learned how to create her own reviewer and even made the ones for subjects she find as challenging. Here's the Filipino reviewer she worked on:

FILIPINO

As I've mentioned, this is only one of the reasons I was away. Though I have been inactive from my account, I have been keeping records of what I have been up to in the past few weeks, and I might share them here in my blog. In the meantime, I'll be perusing Steemit for posts to read. I missed you all.