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(Describer) Quick glimpses show various school children participating in remote learning sessions. Titles: Remote Learning: A Parent's Guide. Routines Matter.

(Describer) Parents are interviewed.

With remote learning, our biggest challenge has been time management. My kids were sleeping in longer... having slower morning routines, showing up to their cameras with bed head and this look of disinterest and Sunday-morning zombie state. It's been pretty easy to incorporate break times because it's already incorporated in the school schedule. We had to work our way through to come up with a routine that was satisfactory for everyone involved. Part of the influence on learning are some routines. We don't want everything to be a surprise and everything to be new because that's what our brain will pay attention to. So having some routines is comforting. Having classroom routines in physical school helps students learn. They know what to expect, they know what's coming next, and they're able to put their attention on the content of learning. And when we're learning from home, we need to attempt to have some of those similar kinds of routines. With remote learning, it's not a day off to hang out in your pajamas and just, you know, not do anything. Remote learning needs to be structured the same way school or as the parent, like, goes to work. The student needs to wake up, brush their teeth, get dressed, get ready, go to their learning setting, their desk, and get ready for the day. At first, the kids were just kind of getting up in the morning, eating breakfast, and sitting at the table, and I noticed that they were just not plugged in. My husband and I made it a requirement that they got up every morning, ate breakfast, and got ready, meaning that they are fully dressed like they were going to school. And, I mean, we really noticed a difference of them having that morning shower and making sure that they, you know, put on clothes, that they ironed clothes, that they made sure that they were presentable. It made them feel better about themselves. My grandchildren really wanted to go off on their own and do their own thing each day, and we were finding that that wasn't as successful as we'd hoped for. We ended up with a morning meeting each day, where we start just a few minutes before they log in for their schoolwork. We check to make sure that everything we thought was submitted did actually get submitted and that has been acknowledged by their teachers or by the computer program. And then we check to see what the new day is going to bring. I've been talking a lot about learning, but there's other routines that we can use. There should be breaks between classes, the equivalent of recess and lunch or passing periods, depending on the age of the student. We need to remind them of that. We need some technology breaks, and when we take technology breaks, we don't go on our cell phone. We go do something else. We've just talked more about healthy physical and mental habits, and we've talked about physical activity, and you're no longer walking through the halls every 45 minutes and stretching your legs-- conversations that would have never been part of our daily life before remote learning. The challenging thing was that we had to stop and think about our daily living to identify these needs of conversation.

(Douglas Fisher) Another routine that's super-helpful is getting enough sleep. We're seeing a lot of kids who don't have sufficient sleep, and they can't remember the stuff the next day because they're exhausted. And so, one of the things that I would really ask parents to think about is that nobody, an hour before they go to sleep, is looking at screens, because that...we know that our brains need to rest, especially because we're on them all the time now, that we need to be able to rest and disconnect from the screen. And that is the case no matter how old your children are, and including you, so that you can get your best chance of having restful sleep. All of those routines, putting things in practice, help normalize this for kids. And when they have routines, it's comforting. It's not chaos every day and pandemonium and wondering what's happening and feeling anxious all the time. Those routines we put in place for ourselves make it so we don't have to think about math, and we can think about other things-- what I'm learning, how I'm gonna learn this, how do I know I've learned it?

(Describer) Accessibility provided by the US Department of Education.

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