Remote Learning Ideas
I am home on maternity leave, but more and more of my fellow teachers are hearing about school closures due to health concerns and potential exposure to coronavirus. I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to send work home or set up some kind of remote learning that are equitable and developmentally appropriate.
First and foremost, ask your students for suggestions (if you have advance warning)! They will have lots of creative ideas for how to best keep their learning going at home. At the very least, they will be able to share the reality around internet access, quiet workspaces, free time, and more at their homes. They will also feel better if you include them in the process and model how this is a new situation for all of us and we are being flexible, understanding, and doing our best.
Remember that some students may be helping to take care of younger children or sharing space with many others. Also, if students have internet access through an adult’s phone only, it is not something they can use for hours on end (or necessarily at all, if that adult goes to work or needs to use their own phone!). You know your students best - what will be the most helpful for them right now? Remember that many of them may be stressed out by the change in routine and may rely on coming to school for many things.
Of course, I understand that many teachers are required to prepare and assign some kind of remote work plan so students can continue learning at home regardless of students’ home situations. For those of you who are required to assign work that will be graded or counted for credit, I am including low tech ideas below for students who will not have internet or technology access.
Some ideas that came to mind:
Math projects: one of the things I don’t enjoy about teaching a set Math program is that we never have time for projects! Math projects can go so many different ways. They are a wonderful example of how Math has real world applications. Depending on what you are studying, have students apply and demonstrate their learning in a creative way. Some successes I have had in the past include proposals for field trips or experiences including budgets, creating robots to explore the relationship between measurement, area, and perimeter, finding applications of multiplication in everyday life, figuring out the best way to share resources in our school, and lots of adventures in data collection (think about people students can interview or poll when they are at home). Students can also share their work in low and high tech ways.
Teach someone how to.. This is one of my favorite Math projects. I had my third graders wrap up our review of subtraction with regrouping by creating a visual to teach subtraction to second graders. They had lots of flexibility in terms of finished product, but had a checklist of things that needed to be included and explained. My students loved doing this and were very creative with their explanations. This could work with many concepts, but make sure it is a review of a previously taught concept.
Letter writing: I love letter writing for every subject! Students can write to politicians or leaders, family members, their future selves, book characters, famous people (in history or in the present), other students, you, and so much more. Letter writing is a great way to show students why we practice reading and writing and how powerful our voices can be. You can see the letter one of our students wrote to Hillary Clinton above this post!
Research projects: every year, I do a bibliography study and essay writing unit with my third graders. They learn so much about a variety of wonderful people and they are so excited to share what they know. While it is best to be able to teach students how to read and comprehend nonfiction, take notes, restate facts in your own words, and so many other skills, students can definitely do some research on their own. This is a great at home project as it can be low or high tech. Students with access to the internet could use a teacher provided list of safe and reliable sources and others could use library books or pre-printed out articles. If library books and articles are not available, they could interview adults at their home or even “research” an adult in their life and interview other family members about that person.
Interview a family member: this is related to research projects, but could also be a storytelling activity. When I taught fifth grade, we had a storytelling unit and had students interview family members as part of a Storycorps inspired storytelling project. While students required guidance for parts of this project, they could still interview a family member and choose to share a story in their own creative way while at home.
Podcasts are a wonderful classroom tool. While it’s hard to think of a way to access podcasts without technology (you could print out a transcript of the podcasts you are assigning, but that wouldn’t really be the same experience and would require a lot of printing out and advance notice/planning!), they are also free, accessible through a variety of devices, and require only enough internet access to download them. Here are some that have amazing classroom potential:
Book Club for Kids: kids discuss middle grade novels
Be Calm - mindfulness podcasts (try out, recommend to kids for bedtime)
Pants on Fire - podcast (Gen Z media) liar vs expert
Listenwise - search engine for educational podcasts for kids
Zooglobble - podcast about music
Anchor FM: make your own podcast
Go Synth - helps with recording podcasts
Bricoradio - experimenting with just letting kids talk, some episodes might inspire your students to make podcasts
I never have time to teach writing poetry anymore, and I miss it! Writing poems inspired by a mentor text is definitely something students (who can read independently) can do on their own/at home. Some of the mentor authors and texts we’ve used in the past as well as different structures can be found here.
These are just some ideas that came to me - would love to hear more ideas and learn about what teachers are actually trying out!
Sending lots of energy and kudos to all the teachers being flexible and supporting their students in so many ways during this uncertain time.