I love games and activities in morning meeting! While I know that carpet time may be gone as we re-enter classrooms, there are so many possibilities for maintaining connection and community even with physical distance.
Below are songs/chants and activities that I think would work well while staying at a desk space. These could make for great energizers or brain breaks as well. While many of these require standing up and sitting down, they should be able to stay in their area.
If you teach elementary, you're likely familiar with the idea of a morning meeting or class meeting. This is typically a time for community building and connection. When we had to switch to online learning in Spring 2020, I knew I wanted to keep elements of morning meeting. Here are 5 ideas (picture prompts, collaborative google slides, partner games, whole class games, and Flipgrid) for building connections online.
I love having kids reflect in journals on paper and take notes in notebooks; however, I've enjoyed using Google Slides as digital reader's notebooks. Read here to get a set of slides you can adapt and use for free.
No matter how great you are at classroom management, there will be times when you want to create individual behavior plans and when it’s necessary to the health of your classroom. Still, it should a later step in the classroom management process because it requires so much work. If you can, I encourage you to wait on an individual behavior plan until you have tried some of these ideas.
I love Morning Meetings with my sixth graders. Our typical Morning Meetings follow the structure from Responsive Classroom, but there are some days that we spend a lot longer on activities than others. Sprinkled throughout the year, I love to teach my students mind games. These mind games are ones that can only be done... Continue Reading →
Number Sense Routines have become my passion. Over the past couple of years, I've been exposed to more and more websites with so many free resources. Now, I am obsessed! There is so much variety. I love how these routines and puzzles teach students so many skills. Most of these could be used in an online environment, so no matter how you're teaching this year, these will work for you!
As a camp counselor, lover of morning meeting games, and lover of improv games like from the TV show "Whose line is it anyway?" I've curated several fun but structured games to use with students that can be done with social distancing and zero materials other than people and imagination. Have fun!
Podcasts will be an ideal resource for teaching this year. Whether you're teaching in person with distance and looking for varied independent work or online and have run out of audiobook links, podcasts could make for great independent learning.
Want to view how I did science labs for online/distance learning? I heard from many parents and kids how much they loved having Science this spring. I hope this gives you some ideas of what you could model at home or record and post for students asynchronously.
Classroom jobs were helpful, but not consistent, and honestly - it felt like more work. I felt desperate trying to get random things done and change their popsicle stick jobs every week. I realized, though, that kids love jobs. There’s always someone who wants to do it or will make it happen. So I changed my structure. Here are the keys I found to successful jobs.
We're in the people business. We need to examine our beliefs and constantly make room for ourselves to grow not just in learning new tech tools for distance learning. I want to interact with others in a way that creates a better world.
My personal journals had always been something of a mix of scrapbooking, diary entries, flaps of papers with short stories, pasted in notes, etc. The rise of Bullet Journaling speaks to my love of creativity, planning, and writing. In fact, my favorite subject to teach is Writing. When you google bullet journals, though, you’ll see layouts that make you cringe under Pinterest Pressure. Smashbooks, on the other hand, are meant to be messy. They went through a quick flash of popularity some years back; here’s theK&Company introduction to the smashbookif you want to see a video of the idea. The description at the front of my K&Company smash book says:
“It’s OK. Just smash it in. There’s always room, just like the junk drawer.
Nothing’s right. Nothing’s wrong. It’s all YOURS. We say glue in the gladness.
