How I Do Distance Learning

Introduction

I am going to start out by saying, this is what has worked for my students and parents and I am by no means an expert. I feel like the first thing to consider is what do you expect of your students? Are you at a title one school? Are your students GATE? What about RSP students? Do students have access to computers? Are your students motivated learners? Are parents home, or does it need to be independent? I think you need to ask yourself what is realistic, and go from there. My work, if a kid did it all in one sitting would probably take 1-1 1/2 hours and they would be done. I lay out a suggested schedule to space this out and give them breaks and time for play in between.

A little insight, I have a class of VERY self-motivated students. I make it so assignments are worth House Points. My district is going with the "grade cannot lower, everything is basically extra credit method" so doing it this way felt like it would motivate my students. For each assignment I tell them how many house points they will get for each one. I also assign "optional" assignments where they can earn even more if their little heart desires. After grading the work when the day is through, I simply tally up the points on class Dojo and post a little slide of running totals of points.

Assignments

Every morning we start with a morning message and check in so I can see how the kids are doing! You can click here for that folder of morning check ins. NOTE: Make a copy first and drag it into your drive! You can click here for a copy of my morning slides.

Math: I have been using a mixture of our math curriculum (expressions) videos of myself, and fun games and websites I have found. Mondays I post a unlisted YouTube video of myself working through what the lesson of the week is going to be. I film this on EduCreations with my apple pencil. There is also an app called whiteboard that does pretty much the same thing. I want my students to follow along, or just use it to check answers. To check who has watched it, I usually leave a message at the end (like type in a private comment the answer to number 5 or whatever, and give those kids credit)

Tuesday, depending if it is a long lesson, might be a part 2, or I use our curriculum website and have them do an assignment on there. I like that it gives them the answers, and click the help button for support.

Wednesday/Thursday I find websites to support student learning, but make it fun! I love using deck.toys, prodigy, Quizizz or Kahoot to act as practice and see who is struggling with the concepts.

Friday I either do a 3 act task, a formative assessment of some sort or even a math game to keep it fun. It's really just what I need.

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ELA: I have been using our curriculum (we just have one more week) as all kids have access. I am planning on doing one podcast study, and finish off with our novel study that I end the year with every year.

Typical ELA week: Monday is vocab slides, kids just give me the definitions and insert a picture. Sometimes if we don't have many words, I have them create a video on flipgrid of hand gestures for each of the words.

Tuesday I assign a short read, it's usually barely a page. Wednesday I assign a mini lesson via nearpod where we will practice on the sort read they read. We go over things like text structure, and other concepts that were modeled in that story. Thursday they read a longer story, and Friday just answer questions from that story. The stories are all through our Wonders curriculum.

For podcast studies I have digital slides that go with each episode. Students will be assigned to listen and respond daily. I am planning on doing the same thing for our novel study, and just record myself reading each chapter for those that don't have the novel at home.

Mars Patel | Young Ben Franklin

Writing: I assign a graphic organizer with an article to fill out Mon/Tues. They then transfer that into. paragraph wed/thurs. I give comments to fix and then they turn in the completed paragraph on Friday.

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History: we are covering the road to the revolution. Essentially they have the whole week to complete this. Monday is fill in the blank notes they were given when we were in school. Wednesday is some type of mini project that is due Friday. Examples are: making a poster protesting the king via google slides, and looking at a painting of the Boston Massacre and responding.

Example posters:

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Science: I am making a choice board that they must complete by the end of the week. I usually add videos from mystery science and generation genius to watch followed by 2-3 activities that have to do with the concept. Ex: Last week we learned about decomposers, so one activity they had to define a few key terms. I also had a list of different animals and organisms and they had to drag them in the category of decomposer or not a decomposer. On friday we met on Zoom and did a live Kahoot on Science to earn house points!

Below is what the first slide looked like!