Learning to integrate

Armed with information shared by her friends in China, most of whom are mothers who had already spent two months selecting online classes for their offspring, Mei began tailoring her own plan.

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, China's Ministry of Education postponed the return-to-campus schedule of the new semester. Instead, schools launched distance education and a lot of after-school tutoring institutions also shifted their model from classroom learning to digital platforms.

Thanks to the rich variety of domestic educational sources, Mei has arranged for her son to attend free online classes, ranging from Chinese to mathematics, streamed by TAL Education, a leading afterschool tutoring service provider in China.

She has also recruited a Chinese tutor to teach her son to play guitar through a video chat app, at 100 yuan ($14.11) per hour, around one-third the cost of the same service in New Zealand.

Now Kimi's daily schedule is quite full, and also includes sketching homework assigned by his art teacher in China, and finishing copies of past test papers for Australia's National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy, as recommended by a friend of Mei's in Australia.

"Every day, my husband spends around 40 minutes figuring out the answers to the test so he can help Kimi check his work. During the class breaks, my husband and Kimi play table tennis," Mei explains as she describes the tight and efficient timetable.

The New Zealand government reduced its COVID-19 alert level from"4" to"3" on April 27, announcing that schools can reopen from April 29, but Mei says she won't send Kimi back to campus while concerns remain about the risk of contracting the virus.

Full schedule

Aside from using online learning resources from China, some Chinese immigrant parents are also trying to adapt more to local habits.

Lynn Wu, a Chinese immigrant in Hobart, the state capital of Tasmania in southern Australia, finds the daily routine of her 8-year-old son, Daniel, has become tighter since the boy's school has shifted on-site learning to distance education, mainly through online platforms like Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams.

Every weekday, Daniel opens the laptop to listen to his teachers' wide range of online classes, varying from maths, writing, music to German language lessons, and then does the assigned homework, which takes a few hours in total.

"My son's school hasn't been completely shuttered. Parents who have essential jobs are still allowed to send their children to school," says Wu.