At this point in time many states have decided to close school for an extended period of time to mitigate COVID-19. Here in Michigan schools are canceled until April 5th. Our district then has Spring Break which means a month off. This has left many working parents scrambling to find child care, and most parents overwhelmed with what to do at home for education. Even as a former teacher I found myself thinking “what am I going to do??” So I decided to sit down and bust out a simple schedule and easy activities that will hopefully help me make it through. I figured I might as well share my tips and tricks for teaching from home for three weeks.
My tentative schedule
This is the tentative schedule I hope to keep. My kids are up super early, usually around 6:30 at the latest. So until 8:00 they will eat breakfast and have free play.
In terms of learning activities I will list a bunch of ideas and creative time activities below, but I also know that many districts are planning remote learning, or sending home lessons with kids, so this would be a great time to do those. My goal is to use as little screen time as possible. We don’t do a lot of screen time to begin with so I am going to try to keep up the good fight with that.
Also I have three kids. A first grader, preschooler, and toddler. I really hope to differentiate my learning activities for both my first grader and my preschooler, but I know that may not always happen.
Learning activities
These learning activities are more geared for k-2 since I taught first grade, and my experience is all in lower elementary. Hopefully they provide a springboard for those who are above this level . You can also check out my teaching Pinterest board which has lots of ideas as well.
Reading
- I really don’t have much to say about this, other than read daily. Talk about the books read. Ask questions such as: what was the main idea? Who were the characters? What happened first, middle, last? What was your favorite part.
- While reading work on stretching out words, chunking sounds together, and so on.
Writing Activities
- Write and illustrate a story. Focus on beginning, middle, end; character development; problem/solution
- handwriting practice
- work on cutting skills to improve fine motor coordination
- write an autobiography
Work Work/ ABC practice
Play Bingo
- use ABC
- high frequency words
- contractions
- compound words
- word families
Fun with play dough
- form ABCs
- form the letters in their name
- pick cards to create compound words
- make word families (i.e. -at words, cat, sat, rat)
- high frequency words (look up dolche words)
Write in Salt/sugar/ shaving cream
- like the other categories you can do ABCs, high frequency words, or any other word work your child is working on
Other ideas
- Upper case/ lower case match
- color by sight word (or ABC)
- If you really want to get adventures you can tape high frequency words (or ABCs) onto Candy Land cards, and play the game having your kids say the word or letter in order to move forward.
- Write 3-4 letters or words on a piece of paper many times. Then use bingo counters (or crayons) to color in each work or letter their own color.
Math
- Play “Top It” also known as War. For old children you can have them flip two cards and either have them add, subtract or multiple the numbers to see who has the higher number.
- Just work on simple addition facts. Although I am not one to love rote learning, once kids understand the concept of addition, I think it’s ok for them to memorize facts.
- Play board games. Many board games require counting.
- Make flowers where you put a number in the middle, the each petal has an equation whose answer is that number (for example if 5 is in the middle, 10-5 on a petal, 3+2 on one and so on.
- Similarly to above use play dough to make a flower with a number in the middle and that many petals.
- Something my kids love is when I hide number equations written on post it notes around the house. They then find them and group them together based on the answer.
- String beads on a pipe cleaner
- Color by number
- Play grocery store or pizza shop to have your kids work with money
- Give a scoop of Lucky Charms, different colored Goldfish, or anything they can sort . Sort them, graph them the talk about which is the greatest, which is the least and so on.
- Create shapes with marshmallows (or play dough) and toothpicks. You can even try doing 3D shapes.
Science
- Bake all the things 🙂 I love baking so plan on doing this.
- Insect report: Annabelle has an insect report to do, so we will be learning more about butterflies
- Observe the moon and talk about the phases of the moon and what the moon does for us. If you really love your kids let them make moons out of Oreos.
- Living vs. non living things: cut out pictures, read books, make a sensory bin.
- Learn more about the senses
Social Studies
- Take the time to teach your child their address, and a parent’s phone number
- Cut out pictures of magazines or newspaper of wants or needs
- Create a map of their bedroom
- Learn about holidays from other cultures
- Learn about important people from the past
Creative Time
For these I plan on letting my girls kind of do their thing. But some ideas:
- bake
- use crayon, watercolor and other mediums to create a picture
- learn about a certain type of art and create picture based on that (like pointillism)
- Just allow them to free play
- Perler beads
- learn how to crochet
I hope that these activities will help you through the next few weeks at home with your kids. Like I said earlier, some of these can be adjusted to fit your needs.
Stay healthy friends!