By Ang Yiying & Carolyn Quek

FOR half an hour yesterday morning, Ms Kim Foo, 44, tinkered with the wireless modem at home to get online.

While it was back to school for most students here, her son Shermann Neo, 12, had to stay at home for another three days.

The Primary Six student would have to keep up with lessons at St Gabriel's Primary School and do his lessons online.

Shermann, who returned from a holiday in Hong Kong last Wednesday, was among 30 students from the school who have to stay at home for seven days from the day of their return from H1N1-affected countries.

He joins hundreds of students from primary to polytechnic levels who will be doing home-based learning, with their schools delivering materials to them by post or online, and monitoring their progress by telephone, e-mail and the schools' learning management systems.

This is the first time that home-based learning is being done simultaneously by almost every school in Singapore, a contingency they have prepared for since after the Sars outbreak in 2003.

Ms Foo, an assistant general manager with a furniture company, took leave yesterday to help her son through any hiccups he might face.

Internet connection hooked up, by 9.30am Shermann was logged onto an education portal which the school uses.

He started off the day with a science lesson, learning about the food chain. He moved on to Chinese revision tests, followed by mathematics and ratios.

A ticker at the bottom of the screen tracked the time left on the tests.

Later in the day, he went through an online tutorial on the concept of circles, including on diameter, radius, and calculating the circumference of circles, and looked through PowerPoint slides sent over by his form teacher, Madam Chitra Devi.

The verdict: online learning got the job done, but Shermann was eager to go back to school.

'I like to interact with my friends,' he said.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.