Vancouver moms launch education website for parents during COVID

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – With many parents struggling to keep their kids engaged in learning while stuck at home, two Vancouver moms have rounded up some online educational materials and packaged them up in a brand new website.

VancouverVirtualFamilies.com presents all sorts of education links and resources for children and teens of all ages.

Ashley Hansen is one of the founders. She’s a single mom and full-time student working through her Health Sciences undergrad online.

“I started thinking about how I was going to homeschool as well as continue my own education at the same time,” she says.

That started a conversation with a friend of hers, who became the co-founder, to pull together some resources for families who feel unsupported.

“We had been hearing from our local parenting Facebook group that there were different approaches among schools and districts. Some schools hadn’t reached out after spring break. Parents with kids in the same school had to handle different programs. I think eventually they wanted to give up.”

The focus initially was to provide avenues for virtual schooling, and self-directed learning with games and online activities for preschoolers all the way up to secondary students.

But Hansen says she wanted to build more of a community as well.

That’s when she started focussing on the needs of parents whose children are just entering the school system. For one, they won’t have the advantage of attending an orientation session at their new school, which is normally conducted at this time of year.

She says the orientation was instrumental for her and her daughter as they transitioned to kindergarten in the fall.

“We were able to get kids acquainted with each other enough so that the first day of school wasn’t traumatizing for them. So for a lot of families out there who aren’t getting these events this year, for some of them, it could be pretty tough.”

The Kindergarten Connections section of the website is meant to help compensate for the loss of the introduction-to-school event. Hansen hopes families will check it out.

“Our end goal is to reach out to as many families in the Metro Vancouver area that we can, who have kids entering kindergarten, to be able to connect individual families with other families from their schools who will be going to kindergarten together in the fall.”

Within that module, she aims to put together a video with the help of others.

“A bit of a montage hopefully with staff and teachers and current kindergarten students, just to give future kindergarten students a bit of an idea of what to expect.”

The website’s first newsletter was just sent out and she Hansen she can’t believe the response they’ve had. The next newsletter is expected to be out mid-month.

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