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FREE Resources for Your Classroom

As you take some time to take care of yourself, here are some free resources that will save you planning time and allow you to plan a little less:

Back to School Vocabulary Packet for English Language Learners - This packet has 4 differentiated levels and guides students through 5 days of work for each level.

3rd Grade Problem Solving Path - This packet gives you 10 community based word problems for 3rd grade students.

Parts of Speech Quizzes - These quizzes (with answer keys) gives you multiple ways to assess if students can use the context of a sentence to determine the part of speech of a word.

Long I Spelling and Vocabulary Packet - This packet has 4 differentiated levels and guides students through 5 days of work for each level.

​As the 2020/2021 school year approaches, teachers have a lot of questions about what it will look like. When we ask this question, it seems like all we hear is “We don’t know yet.” Since governors, district leaders and administrators don’t know what schools will look like next year, teachers are struggling to figure out how to prepare. In this blog series, we are looking at 10 ways that we can prepare this summer without wasting our time. Each way will prove beneficial to you, whether your district ends up using distance learning, traditional classrooms, or a hybrid education approach. Included in each blog post in this series will be tech tool suggestions, free resources, and a giveaway entry form.

We have already talked about setting up your digital classroom, exploring technology tools, exploring both digital and paper formats for teaching resources, building up a communication system for parents, digging deep into your standards, making prerecorded teaching videos, having a classroom management strategy prepared and differentiating from a distance. Today we will discuss something else all teachers should do to prepare for next school year:
You can explore ways to find a balance between family and teaching responsibilities.

Something that I do not feel has been discussed enough is how many teachers are balancing our teaching responsibilities AND supporting our personal children as they learn to navigate distance learning. Personally, I have 3 sons at 3 different levels of education - elementary, middle and high school. We have homeschooled before, so I thought that distance learning would be a cinch for us. However, the reality was that the older 2 were having to balance 6 to 7 different classes, with varying levels of expectation and support. Additionally, they were missing their friends and they needed me to be there to support them in other ways. In fact, I'm certain they needed me much more than I was aware they did.

We do not know if distance learning is going to happen in the fall, and I am preparing for the classroom as if it could be either way. However, at home, I am preparing as though we will be distance learning. In my way of thinking, if we aren't distance learning in the fall, it will not hurt to have done some preparation. If we are doing distance learning, I won't have to think about it while I am prepping my classroom for distance learning. 

How Am I Preparing to Balance Teaching and Parenting During Distance Learning

First, I bought each of my kiddos a desk. When we home schooled, we were living in an RV and we worked just about anywhere - on the floor, at a picnic table, in the car, etc. This worked for homeschooling because I was around and I knew exactly what they were working on (because I had assigned it). However, this DID NOT work for distance learning. They needed to be sitting at a desk for Google Meets and they focus better on their Chromebooks when they have a separate desk, away from each other. 

Secondly, we upgraded our internet. We live on an off grid homestead (See my other blog - Our Desert Homestead), so we do not have broadband lines and were using hotspot data from our phones when we started distance learning. While we do not have the option to install broadband lines at this moment, we have upgraded to an unlimited data hotspot and we have gotten my youngest son a phone with unlimited data (like the rest of us already had) in order to make sure that we all have the data we need.

Additionally, we have agreed to create collaborative ToDo Lists in Google Keep. My husband and I each have access to the boys' ToDo Lists, so we know who has completed what and when. This keeps us all on the same page with expectations as well as completion rate.
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Finally, we have set up an afternoon "check in" system where each child checks in with me on what they did that day. This includes me checking their Google Classroom for each class. We set this up the last week of school, during finals, which was not very helpful to last year. However, I hope this will set us up for success if we have to do distance learning in the fall. It reminds me and them that even though I trust them to do their work, I am going to be checking behind them each and every day. 

Having these systems in place will be helpful for my family whether we are doing distance learning or brick and mortar schools in the fall. Hopefully it will also help my stress level regardless of what learning looks like. 

Your family situation probably looks way different from my family situation. That doesn't mean you don't need to think about how you're going to find balance between family and work next school year. Many people suddenly will have new and different expectations in this "new normal" of the next school year.  So what can you do to be more balance next year?

FREE Resources for Your Classroom

As you take some time to think about balance, here are some free resources which may help you out:

Homeschool Preschool Choice Cards - When I was homeschooling, I used these cards to have my son choose what he wanted to do that day. This is great for parents who are balancing teaching and homeschooling littles. You can keep those preschoolers busy and active while you complete work.

ACK Word Family Unit - Needing to work on teaching your personal child to read? Word families are a great way to build in basic phonics skills. This packet gives you multiple ways to work on the ACK word family.

We have already talked about setting up your digital classroom, exploring technology tools, exploring both digital and paper formats for teaching resources, building up a communication system for parents, digging deep into your standards, making prerecorded teaching videos and having a classroom management strategy prepared. Today we will discuss something else all teachers should do to prepare for next school year:

You can consider differentiation options.

Differentiation was a very challenging part of distance learning. At my school, we used Google Meet for our live lessons, and there were few ways to have each student working at their own pace. However, all of my students still had individual learning needs. One way that I was able to provide differentiation was with a To-Do list. I presented a list of possible math problems. Students start at the top of the list (with the easiest problem) and then work their way down as they get each problem correct. (I presented the list on Google Meet and then watched their work using Whiteboard.fi.) This allowed my quick finishers to move on to harder problems and I could attempt to support my struggling students with guiding suggestions. Since I couldn't pull those struggling students into a "small group" like I would in class, I would then create a video mini lesson on any topic that I saw them struggling with and post it onto Google Classroom.
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This tweaked version of the To-Do List differentiation strategy (which I used in my brick and mortar classroom regularly) worked well in a distance learning environment. Another differentiation strategy that works well with distance learning is tiered assignments. In my math lessons, all students were working on similar problems, but at a range of difficulties. I generally had 3 or 4 different problems. Students are told ahead of time which level they should work on. All students worked on the 1 problem that was closest to their level. Then we reviewed all of the problems as a whole class, so all students could benefit from the review. This could be done with reading comprehension questions as well.
How else could differentiation look in a distance learning environment? Some of that will depend on your particular school's rules and expectations. We weren't allowed to do breakout groups because of technology issues and equity concerns, but small group instruction might be a differentiation strategy that works really well at your school. No matter what, differentiation needs to be at the forefront of our mind. I suggestion looking at the different strategies that I line out in 10 Differentiation Strategies - How and Why to Use Them, and asking yourself: "Is this something I could tweak to work in a digital environment?" and "How can this work if I need to go back and forth between bricks and mortar and distance learning?"

FREE Resources for Your Classroom

As you take some time to think about differentiation, here are some free resources which may help you out:

Subtraction with Regrouping Tiered Activity - This activity gives you 3 leveled sheets for subtraction with regrouping, as well as a quiz for pre and post testing students.

Shape Words Self Correcting Puzzles - This puzzle allows students to work on reading shape words. They know automatically if they have the correct answer because each word only fits with one picture. Once students have used this puzzle at least once, give them a set amount of time to see how many they can match. (Different groups can have different amounts of time.)​

The Tortoise and the Hare Fable Response Packet - This packet has multiple pages at multiple levels. All of your students can read the same fable, while filling out different pages in a form of jigsaw differentiation.

We have already talked about setting up your digital classroom, exploring technology tools, exploring both digital and paper formats for teaching resources, building up a communication system for parents, digging deep into your standards and making prerecorded teaching videos. Today we will discuss something else all teachers should do to prepare for next school year:

You can create a classroom management system that will work with in class learning AND digital learning.

One of the most challenging things about distance learning for me personally was that I could not longer pass out dragon tickets (our school's PBIS rewards), which were the backbone of my positive behavior system. However, because I had built strong relationships with my kiddos, I was able to do very low key rewards like shout outs that helped keep my kiddos on track. 

Now as we look at going into a school year that MAY begin with distance learning OR hybrid learning, we need to think long and hard about what kind of classroom management system we will need to develop in order to teach children that we may NEVER see in person. Two years ago, I wrote the blog post: Classroom Management Strategies to Get Your Class to Do Their Best. In this blog post, I said that in order to build up your classroom management system, you need to:

1.) Have clear expectations. 
2.) Have good procedures and routines.
3.) Get to know your students well.
4.) Offer a variety of rewards.

All of these steps are still true if we are doing distance learning OR hybrid learning, so it is worth thinking about how each of these would need to be tweaked for a distance learning situation or a hybrid learning situation.

What will classroom management look like in digital or hybrid learning?

Having clear expectations in an online environment means knowing what to expect. Although this is slightly more challenging, it's also all the more reason to play with those technology tools BEFORE you need to use them to teach. By playing with them, you know what to tell your students that you expect. Additionally, explaining clear expectations in a distance learning environment, especially with younger students, might mean explaining those expectations to the parents as well. Since parents control the home environment, it will be important to communicate these clear expectations of how students should act in class with both parents AND students.

Having good procedures and routines will be important in digital and in person environments, but it will be MOST important in a hybrid situation where students may be moving between distance and in person environments. One of the procedures that will be extremely important will be having a clearly organized digital classroom (like Google Classroom or Edmodo) that students understand how to use. Be very clear with directions. And most importantly, keep these directions consistent with in class routines when students are working from a distance. If the distance learning looks completely different than the in class learning, you are asking students to learn double the procedures and routines.

Getting to know a student that you aren't in a classroom with for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, seems challenging. However, when I reread the blog post: Get to Know Your Students Better: Top 10 Strategies that Go Beyond the Beginning of the Year Ice Breakers that I wrote a few years ago, I came up with ways to make almost every strategy work within a distance learning environment. The one big challenge for me personally with be monitoring group work, as I use Google Meet, which does not allow breakout sessions. Those of you using Zoom should have less challenges with this one. But honestly, if you are having any kind of group interactions with your with your students, you can learn a lot about your students by who is and who isn't speaking up when.

Finally, rewards. In the past few years I had been encouraged to move away from digital behavior tracking systems like Class Dojo, and this meant that I had no way of rewarding my students during our live Google Meet lessons. Because I don't know what next year is going to look like, I know that next year I WILL have a digital behavior tracking system that can work WITH a paper system. This may be something like Class Dojo, Bloomz, or Class Craft, or something as simple as recording "points" with a Google Form. Additionally, I will provide rewards to kiddos that can be done in a digital system OR a physical system. I always allow students to pick a reward after they have collected a set number of tickets. (For 3rd grade it was 20 tickets.)

Some of the rewards I plan to include next year are: wearing a hat or sunglasses to class, show and tell passes, telling the class a joke, the student getting to choose MY hairstyle for the day, positive phone calls home, getting to sing a song to the class, getting to do a directed drawing, or getting to choose the GoNoodle video we watch.  Of course in addition to these large rewards, I need to be more intentional about doing verbal shout outs and virtual high fives for my kiddos. It's easy to lose track of the need for these when you are not sitting right next to the kiddos. Since all of these rewards can be done in person OR digitally, having this set up will help me regardless of what the Fall looks like.

FREE Resources for Your Classroom

As you take some time to think about your classroom management system, here are some free resources which may help you out:

Student Book Review Bookmarks - Kiddos can rate the books they read so that others know if it is a good or bad book to read.

Math Fact Reward System - Students get to color in symbols to show they have mastered different levels of math fact fluency.

Memory Card Game Template - Create a game for your students for any topic. Or let them make the game! Makes a great "learning" reward.

We have already talked about setting up your digital classroom, exploring technology tools, exploring both digital and paper formats for teaching resources, building up a communication system for parents and digging deep into your standards. Today we will discuss something else all teachers should do to prepare for next school year:

You can create teaching videos.

I know some of you read this and said "Okay, Heidi, you said these blog posts were going to be for distance learning, hybrid learning OR in class learning. Now you're assuming we will be distance learning next year. That's the only reason we'd need to make teaching videos." While teaching videos are definitely helpful for distance learning, they can absolutely be used in a bricks and mortar school.

While teaching in a standard bricks and mortar school, I have created videos that my students used in a computer center, as homework help, and as support when they are stuck on a topic or a project. How many times have you felt like you need to clone yourself in your classroom? Having pre-recorded mini lessons is a way to kind of have 2 of you in your classroom! Instead of being stuck and missing out on learning time, learning videos give students a way to get unstuck and utilize their time better.

Of course if we are distance learning, teaching videos give students a way to cover the topics asynchronously if they are missing your Google Meets or if they are stuck on an assignment outside of your office hours. Students can go back and re-watch videos to help them. And if we are distance learning, students can watch videos WITH their parents. How many times have you had parents tell you "I don't understand how you explain this strategy." If you have videos available, parents will know how you are explaining it and be able to use similar strategies with their kiddos.

Creating Prerecorded Mini Lessons Helps Me Be a Better Teacher
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Personally, I have found that creating video mini lessons helps me think harder about how I want to present information to my students. Because I know that videos must be short and sweet to hold my students' attention, I spend a lot of time prepping before I start recording. I make sure to choose the best possible examples and have all of my materials ready.  This means that I am preparing my presentation and explanation skills ahead of time and I will be more prepared for live teaching the next time I have to present that same information.
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So, what programs do I use to create videos for my classroom? I've used a wide variety of programs, but often I just create a presentation like I would in class and Screencastify myself teaching it. Here is an example video I did for Problem Solving Basics. However, next year I plan to use Flipgrid, which I already use to have the kiddos record videos, to record most of my videos. The reason I want to go this route is so that I can create a video and students can respond with their own videos, keeping it all in one place and making it easier for me and the kids. Some other options for creating videos are: Moovly, Animoto, Powtoon, HippoVideo, and iMovie (only for Macs). ​

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FREE Resources for Your Classroom

As you take some time to make videos for your class this summer, here are some free resources which may help you out:

Interactive Notebook Set Up Guide - Creating interactive notebooks with kiddos next year could be a great way for kiddos to build their own reference book. Especially if students are in a hybrid learning situation, building a notebook on your in class days and using it to help guide them on their at home days. This free resource guides you through setting them up and provides you with pages for the table of contents and your first lesson.

Holiday Recipe Project - Cooking with your parents is a great way to get talking about Math. This project has sheets to guide students through the process, so that their parents know what math they might discuss.

We have already talked about setting up your digital classroom, exploring technology tools, exploring both digital and paper formats for teaching resources and building up a communication system for parents. Today we will discuss something else all teachers should do to prepare for next school year:

You can dig deep into your standards and your curriculum.

​HOW we teach lessons may be up in the air, but the standards and the curriculum are not likely to change over the summer. No matter HOW you are teaching, truly understanding WHAT you are teaching can only make you a better teacher.

Start with the standards. I use the Common Core Standards Website to read each and every standard. Take time to dig into exactly what is expected of students. Look deeper at the standards that sometimes get overlooked (like speaking and listening standards). Go back a grade level and explore what standards they were expected to master last year (and which ones they might not have had a lot of exposure to, due to the closures). Go ahead a grade level and explore what standards students will be working on next year. Think about what you need to cover this year to make sure they are ready for these standards.

Next take time to dig into your curriculum. Start by looking hard at your assessments. Are the assessments properly aligned with the standards? Are they aligned with the curriculum? Are you allowed to change them? (Yes, this is a real question. Some schools and districts require certain assessments to be given as written. If you can't change a bad assessment, you might think about creating other smaller assessments to give along side the required assessment.) What resources (digital and paper) can you use to prepare students for these assessments? Will your curriculum provide you with these resources cover all of your standards and prepare your students for these assessments, or do you need to look elsewhere?

Diving deep into the standards and into your curriculum will allow you to be better equipped to teach next year. No matter HOW you are expected to teach - using Google Meet, prerecorded videos, Google Classroom, in person small groups, in person whole group, etc. -  you need a strong understanding of WHAT you are needing to teach. And when you don't know the HOW, the WHAT becomes that much more important.

One additional thing you may want to consider adding to your standards is a digital citizenship program like the one from Common Sense Media. Since our students will likely have additional technology time with any future school program, teaching students how to use the internet well is just as important as everything else we teach.

FREE Resources for Your Classroom

As you take some time to explore your standards and your curriculum this summer, here are some free resources which may help you out:

Playing Card Mat Math Games - While you're digging into your math curriculum, think about which of these mats students could use to play math games - at home or in your classroom.

Text Consumption Sheet -  This sheet gives students a chance to show understanding of all reading common core standards - fiction and non fiction.

Differentiated Nursery Rhyme Response Sheets -  These three sheets allow students to use any nursery rhyme you have to show reading comprehension. This covers multiple reading standards.