Concurrent Teaching

In case you're all turned around by the lingo (like I constantly am…), concurrent teaching is when a teacher has on-campus students and distance learning students watching lessons at the same time. Now, I'm not 100% concurrent. I have my distance learners with me for part of the day, and then the other part of the day they're doing pre-recorded lessons and activities on Seesaw. Apparently that's a part synchronous, part asynchronous program, or a hyflex hyrbid… honestly, the lingo is too much for me! All you need to know is that sometimes, I have distance learners on Zoom live in the classroom with me.

My Setup

I've tried to keep my set-up as simple as possible, because honestly I need to keep my attention on my students. If the technology takes too much focus, it's just too hard to stay with my learners.

Laptop Setup

My main tool is my 3-tier cart from Michaels. I love that I can put my laptop on top and then roll the cart around so that my Zoom students can see whatever they need to be able to see. I'm still working on getting it at just the right angle and position to not block the view of my kids on the carpet. But I'm finding that if I position things higher on the whiteboard, everyone can see better.

TV Setup

Sometimes I need to be able to show things on the TV, like when I want the children in the classroom to be able to interact with the children at home on Zoom. Other times, I need to show a video lesson to my on-campus students–our science lessons are prepared by another first grade teacher, and our enrichment classes (specials) are all video lessons.

For this setup, I recently switched to using my iPad. I was originally using my laptop, but I needed to be able to do other work on it, so it was very inconvenient to always be using it for screen sharing to the TV. Making the switch to the iPad was so much better, because my laptop is now freed up.

When I'm using the TV, I keep this setup on my desk, so that I can have all the tech stuff safely in one place. So far, this works really well.

Document Camera

I also have the option of showing a document camera during a lesson. To do this, I use my laptop hooked up to the TV. My on-campus students watch the document camera on the TV. My online students see the document camera on my shared screen over Zoom.

Future Plans

There are still some additions I am hoping to add on to my setup as time goes on.

The first thing on my wish list is a headset mic that can work with a Bluetooth speaker. My voice is getting really worn out talking through my mask (thanks to Covid), over the air conditioner (thanks to 100 degree weather), and over air purifiers (thanks to wildfires). I've seen some teachers trying out a headset, and I think I'm going to have to give it a go! I will definitely share if I find a good one!

What does your setup look like?
xoxo
Laura

The post My Concurrent Teaching Setup appeared first on Love Grows Learning.

When we started teaching virtually, I knew I wanted to incorporate small groups, but I wasn't sure what it would like. After experimenting in the spring, I have found a structure that I am loving for my small groups.

My small groups are 3-4 kids. In reading small groups, I group them by reading level so that we can read books that are just above their independent level. For writing small groups, their levels are all mixed up. They can learn so much from seeing each other's stories, I find it's better for them to be in a mix of skill level.

Small groups meet for 30 minutes. Most students get one writing small group and one reading small group per week, but my lower readers get reading groups twice a week.

So what do we do in our virtual small groups? Here's how we do it…

Reading Small Groups

I squeeze a ton into my 30 minutes. It's one of the only times I can watch students do skills independently, and also offer support and teacher interacting as they tackle new skills. Lately my reading groups have consisted of these activities:

• Phonological Awareness: This is a skill that often gets skipped, but it is so so important for beginning readers. I throw in a few exercises where students are answering one at a time – identifying rhyming words, blending/segmenting words, switching beginning/ending sounds to make a new word, or adding/subtracting sounds from words. With the small group, I can focus on the skill that those children need most to boost their reading.
• Dictation: We also do a few dictation words (3-4, I keep it short). Again, I love that I can practice the spelling pattern that's right at their reading level.
• Guided Reading: I find most of my books on Epic or Reading A-Z. I can easily share my screen with my readers so they can read along with me. For guided reading, I usually preview the text and one reading skill we'll be focusing on, then I have them read a page one at a time so I can offer support and reminders when they get stuck on a tricky word. Then we do some comprehension work when we finish the text.
• Shared Reading: For shared reading, I choose a text slightly above their level, and we read it all together. Sometimes I cover up words, and they have to be “word detectives” to figure out what the word could be and what letters we should look for. Shared reading is a great way to demonstrate the skills needed to tackle a book just above their current level.

Writing Small Groups

Our writing small groups last spring were mostly a check-in, providing a time for students to share their work and to show where they were in their process. This fall, we've started incorporating more instruction pieces. These are some of our plans:

• Interactive Writing: Writing a story together can be a great way to showcase a specific genre and reinforce how to use certain writing strategies. Since the teacher is doing all the writing, it frees students up to have big ideas about what to add, and to put all their focus on content. I like to guide the kids to come up with a story idea together, and then get their input about what should go on every page, guiding them to deepen the level of their ideas as we go.
• Shared Writing: This is a great way to check in on students while they do their process. You can pick a specific and doable thing to write (such as a poster or card), and then brainstorm ideas together about what kind of words should go into it. Then you write it and they write it. Sometimes I like to stop and prompt them to write the next word without me, so they can practice sounding out a certain word. But most of it is written with me modeling, so they are getting practice writing accurately.
• Sharing: Sharing stories is always something I wish we had more time for. It's so good for students to get used to talking in front of their peers and to develop a sense of pride in their schoolwork. When I do sharing, I like to have students read their story, and then allow other students to give compliments. I like to compliment too, usually pinpointing a specific quality I want the other writers to start using more in their stories.

Assessment

Small groups are also a great opportunity for assessment. Every small group is essentially an informal assessment as long as you're targeting specific skills and strategies while watching students try to use them successfully on their own.

But sometimes, I also throw in some formal assessments. Guided reading is a perfect time to throw in a running record, because I can hear students read one at a time – they never even know I'm doing it! And I can ask them during shared writing to write a certain part by themselves, which gives me some really helpful insight into what they can do without teacher (or parent) assistance.

It's great that these are low stress ways to get some assessment in, because honestly, learning virtually is stressful enough for students!

How do you use small groups?
xoxo
Laura

The post Getting the Most Out Of Virtual Small Groups appeared first on Love Grows Learning.

Goals of At-Home Materials

The materials we chose seemed to fall into three categories. These categories helped us select materials and identify the purpose of what we were sending home:

1. Scaffolds For Independence: Some of the materials are anchor charts, reminders, or cheat sheets to help students do their work without the assistance of a teacher on hand.
2. Learning Manipulatives: We tried to send home as many hands-on materials as was practical to aid in lessons. Manipulatives are so crucial for younger students–not just for learning, but also for engagement.
3. Project Materials: There are so many wonderful activities and projects we start the year with–art projects, science experiments, class projects–and we wanted to be able to include as many of these as possible in our virtual plans. This meant thinking ahead about what materials student would need at home to be able to complete this work.

Breakdown of Materials

I'm excited to share with you everything they got for at-home learning! We are planning to do additional pick-ups every two weeks, so that we can continue to hand out materials that are needed for upcoming lessons.

Math Toolkit

Out math toolkit is chalk-full of manipulatives and game materials. We included these in pencil box for easy storage:

• 2 sets of dice – dots and numbered
• 10 linking cubes
• 10 double-sided counters
• Whiteboard marker and eraser

These tools are so helpful for our live Zoom math lessons. They provide so many opportunities for me to work in student participation and engagement. The double-sided counters are great for games and for looking at combinations that make certain totals.

Dry-Erase Pocket Sleeve

These have been so helpful to use during lessons! I included 3 different templates that we use during math that have number bonds, ten frames, and addition sentence prompts. I numbered them all so that I can just tell students which number we need that day. In the back is a piece of white cardstock, so that the back is always our blank side. While we are mostly using these in math lesson right now, I am going to start using them for dictation words soon as well.

Writing Folder

This is something we use every year in class, so it was simple to send these home as they were already prepared. Students use their folder to store the stories they are working on and the stories they finished. Inside the folder is a sheet protector with a page the pictures and the spellings for our alphabet sound cards and also a page of sight words. These are for reference while they write. We also gave them some story packets to get them started on their writing!

Reading Folder

The reading folder is a new addition, but it seemed like a convenient way to store all of their reading supplies in one place. Their reading folder has sheet protectors to put anchor charts (we started with out first anchor chart of the year – reading superpowers). In the pocket of the folder, we put their letter tiles, which we use for word building and phonics actitivies.

Science Materials

We selected the materials they need for the first few weeks of science – some planting materials, a few project materials, and the science reader. We use FOSS, which is a very hands-on science program. So we'll definitely have to send home more materials as we go. We also sent home our Science Journals, where students keep a record of the experiments and concepts gone over during science lessons.

Ongoing Projects

We decided to send home their whole alphabet book, which is the first ongoing project we have. It seemed simpler to send the whole book ahead of time rather than send page by page for parents to print and cut out each day. This strategy will be useful for future projects that have a similar, on-going pattern.

Art Materials

Our school is all about arts-integration, so we include an art project every single day as part of their classwork. Some of these are optional, but many of the families love to do them as a break from worksheets and academics. We sent out a questionnaire at the beginning of the year to see if families needed us to provide any basic art materials (colored pencils, construction paper, glue, paints). Then as part of our pick-up, I put together any additional materials that were required for the next two weeks of projects. This week, we sent home sequins, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, and beads!

So far these pick-ups have really helped us stick to a lot of our normal lesson plans. Transforming lesson plans has been a big job this year, so anything that can help have students get a similar experience to what they would have in the classroom is hugely helpful!

What materials are you sending home with your virtual students?
xoxo
Laura

The post Materials To Send Home With Your Virtual Students appeared first on Love Grows Learning.

Sitting here ten days away from a virtual first day of school, I am continually reflecting on how I can build an authentic and supportive classroom community without being face to face with students. While many of my favorite activities for the first two weeks of school will have to be set aside (painting our book bags, learning group dances, teaching how to turn and talk…), there are some that I am determined to transfer to our virtual platform.

These are some of my favorite ideas for the beginning of the year, and I think they will still work even without being in person with my students.

Welcome Letters

We do these every year, and I think this year these will be even more special. The week before school starts, we send a snail mail letter to each student, with a short message from their teachers. It's such a great way to generate excitement about the start of school, and to help students feel seen and appreciated by their teachers before school even begins! Here are the cute cards we love to use:

First Day Of School Picture

In past years, we've used this adorable homemade wooden frame with cutout letters to take a picture of each child on the first day of school. Then a few days later, we print out the photo and give it to their families when they come for our Back To School Night. While we won't be holding a Back To School Night this year, I still want to create an opportunity for students to have their first day of school commemorated with a photograph. I think I am going to transform our photo frame into a print-at-home coloring activity, and then have families upload to Seesaw a photo of their child holding their finished product!

Class Promise

This is always one of my favorite activities. After reading many picture books and having several conversations about our classroom rules and norms, how to be a good friend, and introducing growth mindset, we write a classroom promise containing the attitudes and behaviors we are going to strive for. Then every child decorates a handprint with their name and we post them around the edge of the classroom promise. The promise hangs in our room the whole year.

Well this activity is just too good to eliminate. We will still be reading those books together, and we will still be having those conversations, so why can't we still create a classroom promise? I plan to send this home as a project for students to cut out and color in their handprint, and post a picture of it on Seesaw. I'll take all the pictures and create a virtual class promise that can be shown to students and that will live in our Seesaw Announcements area all year long. I may even print our their handprints and also hang the class promise in my classroom, so they can see how it looks hanging on the wall.

Garden Of Love Wall

Part of our discussions around classroom community involve creating our “Garden Of Love” wall, which has words for qualities we want to emulate in our classroom, such as “kind”, “perseverant”, “brave”, and “honest”. Each time we read a picture book that exemplifies one of these words, we add it to our wall. By the end of the first two weeks, we have a huge collection of wonderful words.

Throughout the day, we mention when we notice students living these words in the classroom or on the yard, and we invite the students to choose a plastic butterfly that we pin next to the word. Soon, we let students do the noticing and they can “give butterflies” to their friends. A couple times throughout the year, we switch out our board to make it snowflakes in the winter, and flowers in the spring.

This is another activity I couldn't let go of, so again I am thinking of creating a virtual page to make this happen. This slideshow page will let us still give butterflies to students, so they can see their contribution to the classroom's “Garden of Love”!

Reflection Flipbook

It's so important to give students a space to reflect on new beginnings and to take in their responses. This flipbook project has been a favorite of mine for letting students represent their first week of school impressions and experiences through artwork and words. While I won't be able to beautifully display these in my classroom, I can still send these home to be completed and display pictures of their work in our virtual Student Work area.

How do you build community in your classroom?
xoxo
Laura

The post First Week Of School Activities: You Can Even Do These Virtually! appeared first on Love Grows Learning.

When we are on campus (you know, in non-pandemic times…) Circle Time in the classroom usually consists of:

• Songs and Movement: I have a huge collection of songs and movement that coincide with our language arts units.
• The Pledge: We have a musical version (of course!) of the pledge with a special added verse that talks about the unity of all nations and peoples. There are sign language movements that we do with it.
• Student Compliments: We invite students to give compliments to each other about positive behavior they've noticed so far that morning.
• Morning Message: Every morning I write a short letter to students on the board about what we're doing that day. After reading it together, students volunteer to circle sight words or words with a certain spelling rule.
• Calendar: We lead students through changing the date every day, and we write down the day of the week in English and Spanish.
• Schedule: We have magnetic labels with all the subjects that we put in order every day on the whiteboard and then one student reads out the order of the subjects for the day.
• Sharing: On certain days a week, students can volunteer to bring something special from home that they want to share with the class.

So the big question is…

How can we have Circle Time in a distance learning setting?

When we started distance learning last spring, we decided to continue to start each day with Circle Time. We made it optional, but the kids loved it, and we had almost all of them join us each morning.

So from 9-9:30 every morning, we met on Zoom and spent time together singing and learning and laughing. My kids loved the chance to see everyone face to face and interact with some non-academic activities.

Here is a sneak peek of how our morning Circle Time over Zoom would go:

Songs

Singing songs together over Zoom is easy! Just mute everyone except the song leader. My students loved singing along and doing our movements to familiar songs we had sung all year long.

Morning Message

My handy whiteboard made Morning Message seem the same as when we were in the classroom. I would have it pre-written off to the side so I could easily grab it after singing.

Calendar

After the Morning Message was read, I would call individuals to tell us what the date was and the day of the week.

Interactive Games and Activities

Here are some of my favorite interactive games to do over Zoom:

• Swingman – like hangman only he's on a happy swing, helps with word recognition and spelling patterns
• Madlibs – they have kid editions that are so fun, these also help with grammar and parts of speech
• Class polls – we would give them three choices (like strawberries, oranges, or watermelon for fruit) and then we would tally everyone's responses in a bar graph and talk about the results
• Sharing – students could choose something in their house to show to the class. We had some fun ones during distance learning – lego creations, stuffies, and even pets!
• Mingle Mingle – we would give kids a question (what did you do this weekend, what's one game you played last week, etc) and put them in groups of 4-5 in breakout rooms to talk and visit about the question. They loved this social time!

Changes For The Fall

There are some tweaks we are going to make this fall to get even more out of our morning Circle Time:

• Handwriting: We decided to include our handwriting instruction in our morning Circle Time. This will be a simple addition to our morning routine: a few times a week we will have a letter that we introduce at the end of circle. We will have students trace it with us in the air, on their hand or thigh, and then fill out their alphabet page that goes with it.
• Read Aloud: I also want to include some read alouds in our morning circle. Once or twice a week, I will choose a short book to read together in the mornings. Read alouds are so important in my work to establish classroom communities at the beginning of the year, I wanted to make sure that I found a whole group live time to read some of my favorite picture books.
• Ice Breakers: For the beginning of the year especially, I want to focus on ice breaker games, community-building activities, and getting-to-know you exercises. I plan on including a different game every morning during the first few weeks of school.

With all of the technology available, you could also create a virtual environment for Circle Time, such as Bitmoji classroom, or an interactive board. I've been playing around with the idea of having something in my Bitmoji classroom that links to a Circle Time area, and I created this as a possibility of something to use:

Do you have plans to incorporate Circle Time into your schoolday?
xoxo
Laura

The post How To Lead Morning Circle Time… Virtually! appeared first on Love Grows Learning.

The first thing I am doing is getting my Google Classroom set up (more on that later), and thinking about how I want to schedule the day. We had a lot of practice with it last spring, and after several iterations, we came up with a system that worked really well for families and teachers.

One thing we realized, is that every family is different when it comes to the time and resources they have available to devote to distance learning. Some families were struggling to complete the work we were assigning, and other families were asking for more! So we created some flexibility in our schedule by indicating which assignments were required, and by including optional assignments for families that wanted more.

Here is how we eventually ended up structuring our schedule. This format really worked for us, and if we go to full distance learning mode this fall, we will almost exactly replicate it. We got great feedback from families about how pleased they were with the virtual learning that they received.

Having a schedule, even if I changed it sometimes, was so helpful for me. It helped me make sure I was covering everything I wanted to cover, and gave me some sort of structure to hold onto in my lesson planning.

Live Instruction (Zoom or Google Meet)

We limited the amount of live instruction for several reasons. First of all, it was very hard to coordinate schedules of all our families. Most of our students were sharing devices with their siblings and working parents, so they couldn't hop on for live instruction very frequently. We also found that first graders can't handle a lot of screen time. However, the following worked very well in a live setting:

• Circle Time: We started every morning with Circle Time together. It was such a lovely way to start the day and to feel like a family. We sang songs, switched the date, and read a Morning Message together. Then we would play a game like Swingman or MadLibs. We also incorporated some student sharing during Circle Time.
• Small Group Instruction: The only other live instruction we did was in small groups. We met with every student in groups of 3 or 4 for once a week for reading instruction and once a week for writing instruction. This was where the bulk of our differentiated instruction happened. I am thinking of having these more than once a week this fall. And I will definitely be adding some live small group math work as well.

In the spring, we were using exclusively Zoom for our live instruction. However, since we'll be migrating to Google Classroom in the fall, it is likely we'll be using Google Meet for our live class times instead.

Recorded Lessons (Dropbox or YouTube Links)

We found that recorded lessons were the best way to deliver our instruction. These were usually 5-10 minutes long. We would record ourselves and then create a Dropbox link to send to families. This way, families could choose what time worked best for their students to watch their lessons. Each recorded lesson had an assignment that went with it.

• Reading & Writing Workshop: We use the Lucy Calkins Units of Study for reading and writing workshop, so our recorded lessons were 5-10 minute minilessons teaching a specific reading or writing strategy. The assignment was always independent reading for 20 minutes and working on current writing pieces.
• Math: Our curriculum is Eureka Math. I simplified the lessons to be no more than 10 minutes long to teach the strategy. I often emailed families a PDF with cut-out manipulatives for them to use during the lesson.
• Phonics/Grammar: Phonics lessons were short, usually around 5 minutes. They would consist of learning a new sound spelling team or practice with a particular spelling or grammar rule. For the practice lessons, I often emailed a PDF with cutout letter tiles to use during the lesson.
• Science: We only did science once a week in the spring during distance learning, because we use Foss which is very hands-on. It was just impossibe to get all the materials to the kids, so we would end up filming the teacher demonstrating some of the hands-on work as a lesson each week.
• Read Alouds: Filming a teacher reading aloud a book was a great little lesson to include for students. Sometimes we would even stop and give prompts to students for them to respond to, as if we were in the class together.

Optional Assignments

We tried to include some assignments that were optional, sometimes as a fun activity or some extra reinforcement work. We always marked these with “(optional)” so that families knew these were only if they had the time and desire for more schoolwork.

• Enrichment Lessons: We were fortunate enough to have our enrichment teachers (Drama, Art, Gardening, and PE) filming short classes for the students to do every week. We could offer these to the students once a week.
• Art Projects: Our school emphasizes arts integration, so we offered a project for students to do every day (except the day they had art) that was related to what something we were studying.
• Reinforcement Work: It was easy to attach extra phonics worksheets, math fluency worksheets, and review activities for families who wanted a little extra.

We will undoubtedly have to make some changes as we go along with distance learning this fall. But this schedule will help us create a structured backbone for our program, and luckily last year's schedule only needs a few tweaks.

But, if we end up doing a hybrid model, this schedule will have to change a lot! So stay tuned to see what happens next…!

How are you scheduling virtual learning this fall?
xoxo
Laura

The post How To Create A Virtual Learning Schedule appeared first on Love Grows Learning.

When our school went into distance learning mode in March, it was certainly a whirlwind adventure for the first few weeks. But as time went on, I got the hang of doing things virtually. There were certainly some tools I discovered along the way that helped tremendously! I'm sharing are my top 5 here so that you can be prepared for anything this fall!

Blue Light Glasses

My screen time went waaaaay up when distance learning started. I was averaging 6-10 hours of computer time every day, and my eyes and head were feeling it. By the end of the night, I could barely read my screen, my eyes were so blurry. I read about “blue light” glasses, which supposedly block out some of the harsh lighting from screens to make it easier on your eyes. I am so so glad I got a pair! They really helped soften the negative effects of my screen time. Plus, they are super cute! Here is the pair I got from Amazon:

Video Compress App

This app probably saved me literally hours of time over the months of distance learning. I did a lot of filmed lessons (usually on my phone) which I then emailed to students so that they could watch at a time that worked for their families schedules. But uploading video files can take a looooong time! I was sending them from my phone to my computer, and then uploading them to dropbox – so that's two transfers – and it was really time consuming. Then I got this app and it was a game-changer! I could select the video from my photo library and choose the exact size I wanted the video to be. It made the uploading time less than a quarter of the amount it had been taking me before. So I had more time to you know… actually teach!

Noise Canceling Headphones

For the first couple weeks of distance learning, my husband and I tried to both work in our office. It was not a good idea. He is always on the phone at work, and I was going crazy trying to concentrate in there. The only thing that saved me was my noise-canceling headphones. Even if I just had them on with no music, they muted everything so well. Add the music, and I couldn't hear a thing! I continued to use these even after I moved my workstation into a different room (I could still hear him through the door!). Also, I am probably never going back to cheap earbuds because I am officially spoiled by their super nice sound quality.

Puppets

Thank goodness for Mr. Wolf. My fuzzy husky puppet was my go-to partner for all the phonics lesson videos I did during distance learning. When you're used to having a room full of individuals to interact with, it is hard to suddenly be all alone in your living room giving a lesson! Having a puppet helped me bring conversation into my lessons, which helped them to be so much more interesting. It also gave me the opportunity to model some student-teacher interactions (sometimes Mr. Wolf was the student, sometimes I was the student). For example, I could coach Mr. Wolf through a reading strategy and show him putting together the steps as the student would. For younger kids, utilizing a puppet was a great way to keep up the engagement!

Document Camera

Okay, so this one is kind of cheating because I didn't have my document camera with me at home during distance learning. But I so wish I had, and I fully plan to have it this time around, so I think I can still mention it here. One of the trickiest things for me while Zooming was to show something I was doing on my table and then easily cut back to me teaching the lesson. With the doc cam, you can have it aimed at your table work, and then just switch back and forth between your computer camera and your doc cam on the input! So cool! This is extra helpful for when you're doing something like shared reading, shared writing, or using math manipulatives. I'm super excited to add this to my arsenal for distance learning!

What were your most helpful distance learning tools?
xoxo
Laura

The post My Top 5 Must Have Items For Distance Learning appeared first on Love Grows Learning.

But with social distance orders still very strict here in the Bay Area, the possibility of getting together is definitely out of the question. So that leaves us teachers with the task of doing some creative thinking to make sure our kiddos still feel honored and excited at the end of this school year. Here are some creative ideas that my co-teacher and I have been working on for our 2020 first grade final celebration:

Zoom Party

We decided to have a Zoom party for our last day of first grade. We'll invite students and their families to join us for an hour online to celebrate the end of the year. We'll start off with of our favorite class songs that we've learned throughout the year. Then we'll play some fun Zoom games, such as swingman, howdy neighbor, or MadLibs. Then we'll use breakout rooms to put families together in small groups to share their final fiction stories that they published!

Slideshow

I'm starting to compile a slideshow using pictures of different places in our school and our classroom. I also have a lot of pictures of the students learning playing together in our classroom from earlier in the year, so I'll put those in too. Finally, I am going to reach out to families and see if they have any pictures of their children with classmates. Then I'll put them all together into a slideshow with some of our school songs in the background. We'll play it at the end of our Zoom celebration on the last day of school to celebrate our year together.

Dress-Up Themes

Every morning in our Zoom circle time meetings during the last week of school, we have a dress-up theme! We are thinking of including pajamas and stuffies day (although some of them are always in their pajamas!), crazy hair day, fancy day, and costumes day. It will be optional, but I think a lot of kids will get really excited about the idea of dressing up!

Drive-By Pick Up

We have a lot of art materials, projects that never made it home, and some fun goodies we want to give to our students. To give families the opportunity for an in-person wave and chat with the teachers, we are organizing a drive-by pick up for our students. We'll have a two-hour window for families to come by and get their goodie bags. Their bags have their projects from art class, materials for a few more art projects to do at home, gift books, and their class T-shirts. We're so excited for the opportunity to see our students, hand off their bags, and say hello (from a safe six feet away of course)!

Class T-Shirts

One item going into their drive-by goodie bags is a class T-shirt. We designed a shirt that says “First Grade Room 9, 2019-2020” on the front. On the back it says “Growing together, even when we're apart” and then it lists all of the students' first names. We always paint class T-shirts at the end of each year, and we usually have the kids all sign each other's shirts. So we decided to continue the tradition, but this time we printed all the names for the kids. But we still left a big blank area for painting the shirt, and we included 4 colors of fabric paint in their bags.

Group Photo Message

We decided to hop on the group photo message trend! First I created a message that is 22 words long (the number of students we have in our class). Then I assigned each student a word. Their instructions were to write the word in big bubble letters and decorate it, then photograph themselves holding it up. Then I took all of their photos and put them together in the right order and make it into a single image. They won't know what the whole message is going to be we show them the final picture during our Zoom party on the last day of school!

We're really excited to make this end of the year special for our students, and to celebrate the amazing ways they've risen to the challenge of these extraordinary circumstances!

What are your plans for celebrating the end of the school year?
xoxo
Laura

The post End Of Year Celebrations… Distance Learning Style! appeared first on Love Grows Learning.

The decisions that teachers have to make about year-end assessments will probably be driven in large part by their school. My school is encouraging us to do whatever assessing we can, but letting each teacher use her own judgement about how to do it sensitively. I've decided to rely on informal assessments, and I decided it was important to be clear with myself what the goals of these assessments would be. I'm not trying to hold the students to the usual academic standards, as that wouldn't be fair, but instead focusing on gathering information to pass on to families and next year's teachers. This information will also help to inform my own distance learning strategies should we have to continue this in the fall or winter.

So we got creative and reimagined our assessments, for a Zoom platform. Our goal is to not have the students know they are being assessed, but to keep it a natural part of the activities with what we've already been doing with them during Zoom lessons. Here's a breakdown of the assessments we are giving, and how we're doing them.

• Running Records: Running records actually seem like one of the easiest assessments to do over Zoom. I'm already running small group reading sessions over Zoom every week, so instead of having kids use the books I was screen-sharing from Epic or Raz-Kids, I can just have them read the PDF of the leveled texts. The leveled texts are even available here for download. It can even be done with a small group. I can just have students switch off reading between books (for lower levels) or after several pages (for higher levels).
• Math Assessments: Math is honestly the subject I feel the most out of touch with. It's hard for me to get a sense of how much help they're getting from parents. I'm used to getting immediate feedback from students about what they understand or don't understand and adjusting my pacing based on that. So without that, I have felt a bit in the dark about where they're at. My plan with math is to use one of small group zoom meetings to do a “math review”. I'll give them a problem, have them solve it on their paper, and then we'll all share out the answer. This will give me some much-needed insight into how they are solving word problems and double-digit addition problems with no adult help. It's certainly not a complete assessment, but it will give me some information about math concepts and skills and how successful the lessons were.
• Writing Assessment: My co-teacher leads the writing small group sessions. Instead of doing her normal routine of having students share their work and comment on each other's writing, she's planning on having them write in response to a prompt. Our students have done writing prompts like this in the classroom, so it will be familiar to them. After writing about a page, they'll have their parents take a picture of it and email it to us. Again, this will help us determine what their writing is like without adult help, since it's so hard to determine the amount of support a child is receiving from family members.

How are you doing your class assessments with distance learning 
this spring?
xoxo
Laura

The post Assessing Over Zoom: Ideas and Tips appeared first on Love Grows Learning.

I was determined that my new workflow wouldn't create a permanent mess in our living room, which is the space we disconnect from work, rest, and play. So I devised a system that allowed me to spread everything out all over the place while I worked, but quickly and easily hide it away when it was time to stop working. I cleared out one of the drawers next to our couch and filled it with all the piles of books, baskets of teaching to tools, and stacks of papers I need on a daily basis. I even fit some of my teaching puppets way in the back. Then I made space on top of a cabinet to keep all of my electronic devices neatly stacked when I wasn't using them (during one day, I might use my laptop, my iPad, my Bose speaker, my earbuds, my noise-canceling headphones, and my Phone… yikes!).

During the day, my space is a mess. The papers get spread out, the pens are everywhere, books are all over the couch. But as soon as I'm done working, I sweep everything up and stuff it back in the drawer. It's actually quite a miraculous system, considering my track record with cleaning up after myself. As my husband tells me, I am notorious for getting something out that I need, and then leaving it there and moving on without bothering to put it away! But honestly, it takes me about two minutes to shove everything back in that magical drawer, and even I can handle that.

Adapting as time goes on

Now that we're eight weeks deep in distance learning, I started noticing that my back was not happy working on the couch for all those hours. I was often hunched forward, with no back support, working on a coffee table that was really too low for any kind of computer work. With one-on-one student sessions, I would usually plop on the floor, angling so that both my face and my table surface was visible to the student. Not so good for the body, as it turns out. So now we're onto workspace 4.0, the dining room table! I'm still using my little drawer, which is luckily close by. But now everything is spread out over the table, and I'm able to sit in a real chair! With back support and cushioning! This is only day one in this new workspace, so we'll see how it goes moving forward. If there is one thing we've all had to learn in this pandemic, it's how to be endlessly flexible in ever-shifting circumstances!

How have you been organizing your workspace?
xoxo
Laura

The post How I Organized My Distance Learning Workspace appeared first on Love Grows Learning.