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Rethinking Family Engagement During School Closures

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Taking time to check assumptions about family engagement can make a huge difference in the lives of your students and their caregivers.

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multitude of activities

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Useful links for parents who are at home with preschool children during the COVID-19 pandemic

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well-organized

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Any working parent of toddlers or infants will tell you that juggling home and work life isn't without a slew of unique challenges. From chronic sleep deprivation to daily battles with your toddler to put on pants before leaving the house, the life of a working parent ain't easy.

And that was before the recent coronavirus outbreak. Over the past week, many parents across the nation now face the unique challenge of working from home while also juggling having kids (of all ages) home from school or daycare. And those of us who are parents of high-energy preschoolers-well, we're going to need to get especially creative (I've been working from home for four days so far, and yes, many moments have felt like that BBC video of the dad working from home getting interrupted by his kids while on live TV).
The author's trusty coworkers hard at work
Though my main focus in the coming weeks is keeping my kids safe and healthy, rather than letting my toddler watch a fifth video of people playing with trucks on YouTube in a row, I've been on the hunt to find new, fun ways to foster learning in the weeks ahead. Here's a list of the thirty-two best websites, activities, and other resources I've found, all geared toward preschool kiddos.
Read alouds and reading lists

1. Childrens Books Read Alouds: A collection of short read-aloud videos geared toward preschool- and elementary-aged children.

2. Little Stories for Tiny People: Engaging audio stories for little ones.

3. Brightly: Book recommendations, activities, and read alouds for three to five year olds (with additional read alouds on their YouTube channel here).

4. Storyline Online: Children's book read alouds by famous actors, accompanied by animated illustrations.

5. TIME for Kids: Age-appropriate print and read-aloud articles from TIME Magazine (see grades K-1 edition).

6. Fordham's Kindergarten Canon: Fordham's list of the one hundred best children's books for rising Kindergarten students.

Podcasts

1. Sesame Street Podcast: Songs and stories with all of our favorite Muppets.

2. Noodle Loaf: An interactive, music-themed podcast for young kids; episodes are about ten minutes each.

3. Science Adventure Stories For Kids: A narrative-style, science-themed podcast.

4. Eat Your Spanish: A podcast that teaches young children Spanish through stories and music.

5. Saturday Cereal Bowl: Each episode includes two hours of music filled fun.

YouTube channels and TV shows

1. Curious World: A YouTube channel/early-learning app with games, read-along books, activities, and videos for pre-K children.

2. Brain Candy TV: Fun, educational videos for kids, focused on math, literacy, and science.

3. PBS Kids Videos: Full episodes and clips of popular kids' shows, such as Clifford and Daniel Tiger.

4. Little Baby Bum: A British YouTube channel with colorful and engaging nursery rhymes, songs, and videos (geared toward babies and toddlers).

5. Cosmic Kids Yoga: A good way to get moving; kids follow along as the host tells a story and guides them through corresponding yoga poses.

"Mixed-bag" resources: Educational videos, games, activities, lessons, and more

1. Khan Academy Kids: Activities, exercises, and lessons for kids two and up.

2. PBS Learning Media (pre-K resources): a curated collection of interactive videos, games, and activities culled for preschool educators.

3. PBS Kids Games: An app with educational games for young kids.

4. Scholastic Learn at Home (pre-K resources): Free videos, activities, and stories all geared toward the preschool-aged crowd.

5. Funbrain: An interactive website with educational games, books, and videos intended to help preschoolers develop early literacy, math, and problem-solving skills.

6. ABCya: Preschool word, math, and skill games designed by parents and educators.

7. Sesame Street Workshop: Preschool games, videos, and art activities with Elmo and crew.

8. KinderART: A large library of art lesson plans and activities targeted to preschoolers.

9. Starfall: Simple but engaging interactive math, ELA, and music videos and games for young kids.

10. Seussville: A trove of Dr. Seuss-themed crafts, activities, and printables.

11. The Hungry Caterpillar Play School: An app for toddlers up through Kindergarteners with activities focusing on developing math and literacy skills, plus puzzles, songs, and videos.

12. Pre-K Pages Indoor Recess Ideas: A great list of indoor recess games and physical activities to consult when your preschooler needs to burn off some energy.

13. Nick Jr. Games: Online games and puzzles featuring characters from popular Nick Jr. TV shows such as "Paw Patrol" and "Blaze and the Monster Machines."

14. The Kennedy Center's Draw with Mo Willems: Older preschoolers will enjoy drawing lessons and activities led by children's book author and illustrator Mo Willems.

15. Highlights Kids: A slew of activities, games, lessons, and podcasts (great for older toddlers and preschoolers).

16. Busy Toddler: One mom's (and former teacher's) massive collection of hands-on activities to keep kids busy and entertained.

Four days in, it's daunting to wrap my head around the reality that I'll likely be juggling working from home while also keeping two small children under three alive, fed, and happy for the foreseeable future. But in this stressful time, I'm grateful for the extra time at home with my family, jobs that allow my husband and me to work from home, and for the caregivers and teachers who up until now have taken such good care of our kids during the work week. We've always been extremely grateful to you, but now we appreciate you more than ever.

To all my fellow parents with preschoolers, toddlers, and babies working from home in the weeks (and, likely, months) ahead: solidarity. I hope some of these ideas help inject some fun and learning into your home (and buy you a little time to get some work done in between naps and bedtime)-of course, in addition to other typical favorite young kiddo activities, such as reading together, singing, playing, getting fresh air, going for walks, and the like. My best advice is to try to use this crazy time to build on your child's particular interests and follow his or her lead, but don't feel like you need to become a teacher or homeschool expert overnight. And if you're ever nearing a code-red toddler meltdown, I recommend initiating an immediate family dance party (our kids especially love this song and this one).

We've got this. And hopefully a steady stream of coffee, too.

For suggestions on YouTube channels, videos, and other resources for elementary-aged children, please see here. For resources geared toward middle and high schoolers, see here.

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Smiling through: Thirty-two resources for entertaining energetic preschoolers during daycare and preschool closures

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Any working parent of toddlers or infants will tell you that juggling home and work life isn't without a slew of unique challenges. From chronic sleep deprivation to daily battles with your toddler to put on pants before leaving the house, the life of a working parent ain't easy.

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daily schedule and more

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I created this site for you to help you get through these trying days. These resources are just to be used as guides. Please adjust and make it work for you and your family. Feel free to stick to it to keep a "school like" structure or use it loosely along with other resources you have or those given to you by your child's teacher.

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an extensive padlet of crowdsourced resources for early years teachers; a mix of tools, strategies and content specific things

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a reminder :)

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Heart of a Teacher: A Treasury of Inspiration

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March 23/24, 2020

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PK/K Structuring Online Learning March 2020

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A MUST LISTEN from educators who are 9 weeks into online teaching with the youngest students. A bilingual example too.

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Educators Supporting Educators: Transitions to Online Learning

Get insights, tips and resources from educators who have already transitioned to online learning. In this webinar series, ISS is bringing together educators who have been learning literally every day about how to quickly adapt their classroom teaching to new online learning environments.

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Webinar: Online Learning in the Early Years | ISS

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Educators Supporting Educators: Transitions to Online Learning Get insights, tips and resources from educators who have already transitioned to online learning. In this webinar series, ISS is bringing together educators who have been learning literally every day about how to quickly adapt their classroom teaching to new online learning environments.

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"A choice board is a graphic organizer that allows students to choose how they will learn a concept. The choice board below has nine squares. (There is no minimum or maximum, however nine seems to be a good number.) Inside each square is an activity. Students can choose one or several activities to complete. Choice boards can be organized so students need to finish one square before moving to the next, they can be random, or can be organized in a specific way. The level of difficulty of the activities can vary or stay consistent."

Tic-Tac-Toe Boards and Menus are two different types of choice boards.

"A menu offers students a way to make decisions about what they will do in order to meet class requirements. A menu could be for a single lesson, a week-long lesson, or even a month-long period of study. Once the teacher has decided on what the essential understandings and/or skills are, she/he can begin to create a menu."

"Tic-Tac-Toe choice boards give students the opportunity to participate in multiple tasks that allow them to practice skills they've learned in class or to demonstrate and extend their understanding of concepts. From the board, students either choose or are assigned three adjacent or diagonal tasks to complete.

Choice boards address student readiness, interest, or learning preferences. They are easily adapted to a subject area."

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Choice Boards, Menus, & Tic-Tac-Toe by Sarah Dillard

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specifically for early childhood

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As schools shift to remote learning models for the foreseeable future, parents and caregivers are finding themselves in a new role-that of the school co-teacher. Though parents are naturally a part of their children's ongoing education, co-teaching is a new role for many of them.

Frankly, it's a new role for us (Reshan and Steve) as well, so when it came time for us to pursue our curiosity about how parents and caregivers can best provide hour-to-hour care, we turned to an expert.

Beth O'Brien, head of early childhood at New Canaan Country School in New Canaan, Conn. (and also one of Reshan's colleagues) exudes positivity, warmth and a bone-deep knowledge about the best ways to nurture our youngest learners toward growth. Her counsel leads what follows, and makes thinking processes and plans accessible to others who may be wrestling with similar questions.

The General Approach

Beth O'Brien, Head of Early Childhood Education, New Canaan Country School

Student well-being is our priority. For three-year-old to six-year-old students, daily points of connection with their school teachers will be most important. Whether the method is digital (email, video) or physical (material packets for pick-up, mailed letters), these connections will need to be mediated by parents or caregivers. Short greetings-which can be text, audio, video or some hybrid of the formats-can be followed by invitations to and ideas for follow-up engagement with a grownup at home.

Our goal is not to replicate a typical school-day schedule or intended curriculum online or at home. The goal is to help students continue to feel connected (to the teacher, to each other, to the school), known, and nurtured even though a significant part of their routine has been disrupted. Any cognitive, social-emotional, physical, and moral development that is woven into the new routine is not a reaction to some external pressure to "complete the curriculum." Instead, these dimensions should be interwoven and even prioritized because they are best for children's development at these ages, regardless of the setting.

We have messaged the following to teachers, and we believe the same should be true of parents and caregivers who are asked to be a bigger part of their children's formal education than they may feel prepared to do:

1. Competency will build over time. Give yourself time and space to improve in your role as your child's instructor, and give your child time and space to develop as an at-home learner.

2. Everyone has permission to embrace a "beginner's mindset." To be adaptable, flexible, and willing to make mistakes. A sense of humor will be helpful here as well. Our commitment is to growth and possibility (in remote teaching for teachers, in early childhood teaching for parents and caregivers.)

3. Young children are naturally inquisitive and driven to explore, discover, tinker and test. They are always learning. This shift to 'school at home' will offer you a chance to observe that learning in a new way. Rest assured, development is development is development. Just be present for it. (One of our mentors once said to one of us that she could tell that an early childhood teacher was going to be successful if he or she was willing to sit on the floor with the students.)

4. Ease into things. The first 5 days don't need to look like the next 5 which don't need to look like the 5 or 10 after that.

5. Prioritize what you need to run your household and remain holistically healthy. Work, childcare, meals, checking in on other family members, etc. will require your attention.

6. Focus on self care. It's like the oxygen mask in the plane analogy - make sure yours is functioning before helping others.

Examples of Guidance for Teachers

Because our classroom teachers will be the primary contact with students via their caregivers, it is important to understand the types of things we are trying. These are examples of guidance provided to teachers of 3 to 6 year olds who will be working with parents and caregivers to bridge the time between when the school building is closed and when it is accessible again.

For communication channels, we don't assume that the ones that were effective while school was open will have the same exact impact when it is now closed. Or at the very least, we don't assume that the way those communication channels were used will be exactly the same. Face-to-face contact, between teachers, students and sometimes caregivers while school is open, allows for constant clarification and negotiation. But when one cannot count on seeing the child or caregiver in person, the need to effectively convey clarity, tone, emotion, and priority are all therefore amplified..

Communication channels include:

Teacher email

Phone calls

Face-to-face (planned and informal)

Course and class webpage

Text messages

Parent representative emails

One helpful exercise suggested by our friend Helen Noble from Montclair Kimberley Academy in New Jersey is to look at all of the communication channels and instructional approaches used when school is open and consider the affordances and limitations that are newly introduced when you cannot count on face-to-face, in-person contact with children and their caregivers. Being this deliberate at the outset will serve your plans as you ease into or sharply enter a school closure plan.

For example, the lower grades at her school use Weebly as the main mechanism for sharing newsletters, photos and other class happenings with families. They have also been using the Seesaw platform for digital portfolio work in recent years. In their analysis, they are wondering if they'll pivot more of their communication to the Seesaw platform because 1) they feel they addressed connectivity needs across their families and 2) many of their remote instructional ideas will be better served directly through that platform.

Pre-K Teachers may ...

Send a daily email at 9:00 a.m. with the following content:

A video with a warm friendly upbeat greeting and the plan for the day as well as a few suggestions for activities.

Morning meeting video and an invitation for a follow-up activity.

Read-aloud video along with favorite fingerplays and songs

Consider the possible technologies available to the family: Ask the parent or caregiver to document the child's work through a photo or a short video in order to stay connected to the child's learning experience.

Kindergarten Teachers may ...

Send a daily email at 9:00 a.m. with the following content:

A video with a warm friendly upbeat greeting as well as a brief overview of the plan for the day.

Morning meeting video and an invitation for a follow-up activity.

Lesson videos or prompts in the following curricular areas: reading, math, writing, and social studies.

Activity prompts that can be done throughout the day.

Consider the possible technologies available to the family: Ask the parent or caregiver to document the child's work through photos or a short video in order to stay connected to the child's learning experience.

Specialists (i.e. Science, Art, Music, Spanish, Motor, Materials, PE, etc.) may ...

Record one video each week for each grade level. Upload the video to the Google shared drive and the homeroom teacher will send the link in the daily email.

Create a list of additional activities for the children to do at home.

Preparing a Setting at Home

Illustration credit: Reshan Richards

Here are some ways to prepare space and practice behaviors for follow-up engagement:

Set up an indoor space where learning activities happen in your home. Collaborate with your child about where "school will happen" and what materials will be needed. Set up a place where your child can reach needed supplies such as paper, a clip board, scissors, pencils, crayons, tape, etc.

Children love to be helpers. They want to contribute, and they thrive when they feel a sense of accomplishment. After watching a teacher video or reading a prompt, invite your child to help you collect materials needed for the activity.

As children are working, hold space in your own schedule just for them. Describe what you see. Focus on effort. Name progress. Ask questions.

Be present: Proximity is our most powerful gift. An encouraging smile or a supportive nod will be reassuring.

Describe what you see: You found all the blue and green unifix cubes and now you're making a pattern. That block building is tall. You used a lot of purple today. You did it!

Focus on effort: You kept going even when you were frustrated. You stuck with it when you were unsure.

Name progress: You've done three. You have two more to go.

Ask questions: Tell me about it. I wonder what will happen next? What's your idea?

If possible, document your child's work. Take a photo. Record a short video. Keep a journal of what you are observing.

Consider transitions. Flow, pacing, and movement are vital to a young child's learning. After a focused activity, have children move: run around outside, do flips on the couch, engage in self-directed play.

Rhythm and Routine at Home

Illustration credit: Reshan Richards

Consider the power of routine and rhythm as an anchor to your child's "school days." Create a daily schedule based on what the school teacher sends (whether the message is daily, every other day, weekly, etc.). Have your child help draw pictures or write labels so they can see the plan for the day. Provide as many links between home and school as you can to help your child orient and activate prior knowledge of classroom routines.

Here is a home "school schedule" to consider:

Breakfast followed by morning routine: get dressed, brush teeth, complete morning chores, etc.

Self-directed play: mirrors morning arrival choice time

Lesson & follow-up

Snack & Outdoor time

Self-directed play or set materials from a teacher activity prompt for the child to explore and create: mirrors daily choice time

Daily read-aloud video

Lunch

Quiet Time: audio books, quiet music, rest: mirrors a familiar routine from school

Specialist Video and activity prompt

Outdoor time

Morning Meeting video: greeting, do-with-me movement activity, ideas for the day

Home 'School' Activities

Illustration credit: Reshan Richards

The following is a list of activity suggestions for 3-6 year olds during a time of remote learning. The materials mentioned - crayons, books, pipe cleaners, and so on - could be good items to put in a "pick-up" or "send-home" bag for those families who may not have access to them.

Emergent Writing

Keep paper, pencil, crayons and markers handy

Model writing: lists of things to do, groceries to buy, activity plans or thank you notes

Journal time: find a moment each week for your child to dictate reflections, ideas, a story, small moments you are thankful for

Draw pictures and write letters to friends and family. Add an address to an envelope, a stamp and head to the mailbox

Language Development

Read together every day: fiction, non-fiction, fairy tales, poetry

Read street signs together

Word games in the car: travel bingo, 20 questions, sequential memory stories (ex: I went on a picnic and I brought ___________)

Dinner table discussions and conversations

Oral rhyming - when reading books with a rhyming cadence, stop before the second rhyme to bring your child's attention to the pattern

Tell stories using first, then, next, last

Gross Motor

Outdoor fun: bike, scooter, trike, run, jump, hop, skip

Sidewalk chalk

Play hopscotch

Create a balance beam with tape on the floor

Crab walk, bear walk, wheelbarrow walk

Paint the driveway, rocks, concrete steps with big brushes and water

Shaving cream play in the tub or on an opened dishwasher door (makes clean-up a breeze!)

Sort or fold laundry, empty the dishwasher, set the table

Finger paints

Build in the sand on the beach or in a sandbox

Dig or pull weeds in the garden

Plant seeds and water outdoor plants

Hammer nails into a piece of wood

Jump rope

Throw and catch large balls

Indoor obstacle course

Fine Motor

Water houseplants with spray bottles

Scissor work: cut strips, fringe, or pictures from magazines

Make play dough

Legos and Duplos

Cooking: stir, crack eggs, grate cheese by hand, use a hand eggbeater

Beading

Finger puppets

Pick up things with tweezers

Simple sewing andweaving

Pipe cleaners

Build playing card houses

Math

Collect, sort and classify seashells, stones, pinecones, small sticks, flower petals, baseball cards, etc.

Play board games: Snail's Pace Race, Harvest Time, Hi-Ho Cherry-o, Blockus, Trouble, Chutes and Ladders

Count everything: plates, napkins, cups, socks from laundry, houses, buttons on shirts, toys during clean-up, silverware as you unload the dishwasher

Cook, measure

Identify numbers: telephone numbers, numbers on mailboxes

Puzzles: mazes and jigsaw

Car activities: find shapes, numbers in the environment

Card games: go fish, war, rat a tat cat, memory, UNO

Online Curricular Resources

Illustration credit: Reshan Richards

These are just a few of the many resources that parents and caregivers can look to in support of their children's experiences.

Art & Play Activity Guide: A weekly art and play activity guide for learning at home for children ages 3-8.

Other Goose: Homeschooling resource for families of children 2-6 year olds focusing on open-ended discovery.

Sparkle Stories: Audio stories and activities for children ages 3-12

Nature on PBS: Documentaries that illuminate the wonder and beauty of the natural world

WOW in the World: NPR Podcast for curious children, ages 5-12 and their grown-ups

TinkerLab: Art, science and tinkering guides for parents with children ages 2-12

Parenting Resources for COVID-19

These are some resources for talking with your children about COVID-19

There is a lot of newness these days. As you face new challenges, remember that competency will build over time. Be adaptable, flexible and willing to make mistakes. Consider that being present can often be enough. Ease into things. Prioritize what you need to run your household and remain holistically healthy. And don't forget to take care of yourself.

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How to Keep School Rhythm and Routines for Young Children at Home - EdSurge News

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As schools shift to remote learning models for the foreseeable future, parents and caregivers are finding themselves in a new role-that of the school co-teacher. Though parents are naturally a part of their children's ongoing education, co-teaching is a new role for many of them.

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identifies which one is best for which grades

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Lesson-Planning Apps and Websites | Common Sense Education

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Paperless, painless planning for teachers. Explore this Lesson-Planning Apps and Websites Top Picks list of 30 tools curated by Common Sense Education editors to find relevant and engaging edtech solutions for your classroom.

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Wow.

If you’re anything like me, you’re experiencing a lot of different emotions right now. But chances are we are all marveling at how different the world looks than it did a few weeks, days, even hours ago. Big events canceled. Travel bans. School closures. Toilet paper becoming the nation’s hottest commodity.

This post is not about health measures or containment or COVID-19 symptoms. It’s not about curriculum or technology recommendations or teaching remotely. I’m not going to talk about flattening the curve or social distancing or exponential growth. There are 900 million other articles, posts, and podcasts for that.

This is about taking care of yourself and your mental health during COVID.

I love teachers, and even in the best of times I’m concerned about our self-care. But now, at a time when we’re all taking on the stress, anxiety, and fears of how a global pandemic will affect our children, it’s more critical than ever to remember that we cannot effectively take care of other people if we are not taking care of ourselves.

1. Be kind to yourself.

We are all learners here. This situation is new for all of us, and that means new emotions, new reactions we didn’t know we’re capable of, new fears, new bodily functions (hello, stress burps, I guess you’re a thing now). Would you be hard on the young people in your classroom learning new, tough information? Of course not. So don’t put any more pressure on yourself to learn this new way of living than necessary.

Also, I’m going to say something that could be controversial here: I don’t think those of us teaching remotely should exhaust ourselves trying to drum up ways to make learning exactly the same or better as it was in our classrooms before we left. Will we have to do things differently? Yes. Could this be an awesome opportunity for all of us to learn platforms and tools? Yes. But are our students already dealing with more stress than we could imagine? ALSO YES. They are a a generation who is aware of EVERYTHING because of the Internet and social media. But their frontal lobes are still developing, leaving them with tons of information but perhaps not a lot of emotional capacity to handle or process this in a healthy way. In short: don’t put more pressure on yourself than necessary to put on a dog-and-pony show during tough times. Simple is OK.

2. Keep your hands busy.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received when I was super anxious a few years ago was to keep my hands busy. There’s science behind it, I promise. And, when I’m doing something tactile, it’s hard for me to think too hard about anything, really. And not in the way that I zone out when I’m scrolling Instagram like a zombie, but more of a mellowing out that happens when I truly plug into creativity. My top recommendations:

Puzzles! Y’all. I’m obsessed. My favorite brands are Galison and Mudpuppy. (Yes, I have puzzle brands.)

Embroidery. Look up this old-made-new trend on Pinterest. So many fun ideas!

Calligraphy

Other recommendations: making bread or something else hand-intensive, drawing a mandala, painting or making a collage, playing an instrument (what a great time to learn on YouTube!)

3. Move your body.

Don’t worry about strenuous exercise right now if that’s not your jam. But I think it’s good for all of us to make moving a regular habit (especially if we are teaching remotely and not up out of our seat all the time like a regular school day). Go for a walk if you can. Take a fitness class on YouTube (Yoga with Adriene is a personal fave). Have an impromptu dance party to your favorite song. Ultimately just get the blood flowing and the endorphins pumping.

4. Calm your mind.

This looks different for all of us, but it’s super important to give your mind a break from the barrage of information out there. I don’t know if there has been a better time to download the Calm app (it’s free for teachers!) With guided meditations, nature playlists, relaxing songs, and bedtime stories, you’ll wish you’d have done it a long time ago. But whatever you do, try not to simply distract yourself, but truly disconnect and let your mind “be” for a while. It’s working overtime these days.

5. Laugh.

A global pandemic is obviously very serious. But so is your mental health during COVID. As anyone who has ever cared for a family member with Alzheimer’s will tell you, sometimes you have to laugh in the midst of a terrible thing. Gloria Gaynor washing her hands to “I Will Survive.” Relatable tweets like this one:

me and my coworkers logging into all of our meetings remotely for the next couple of weeks pic.twitter.com/fpOYiHJLcl

— isha (@ikasliwal) March 9, 2020

But if you’re overwhelmed with COVID-19 information—even humor—this is my official plug for the TV show King of the Hill on Hulu. I did not think I would find this show funny, and I have laughed myself to tears. You’re welcome in advance.

6. Stay connected in the right ways.

Use the technology we do have—FaceTime, WhatsApp, Skype—to check in with people remotely. Kelly Wickham Hurst, an educator I follow on Twitter (@mochamomma) had a great suggestion of using each other’s names as often as possible when in social isolation. Check in on your neighbors, the elderly people you know (especially those living alone), and others in vulnerable populations. And if social media is overwhelming you, by all means, disconnect for a while. You will know when you’re overwhelmed. You’ll be at the grocery store and see a long line of people waiting to grind coffee, and you’ll turn to your fiancé with wild eyes and say, “I can’t do this!” Or at least that’s what I did.

How are you taking care of your mental health during COVID closures? Come and share in the WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook.

Plus, why online learning doesn’t need to be perfect right now.

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Teachers, How Can We Care for Our Mental Health Right Now?

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We’re living through history, and the emotions are intense.

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it is not blank; it's a google doc

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Welcome to our play by age page. I set this page up to assist readers in locating activities specifically for their child or child's age.

Click on the images to view the activities for each category.

Please note that all children are different and develop at their own pace. These categories mentioned below are only a guide because children reach developmental milestones at different times.

We have lots of activities and play ideas here on Learning 4 Kids for children age between 2 - 3 Years. Opportunities to arouse the curiosity of any toddler and support early development and skills.

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Welcome to our play by age page. I set this page up to assist readers in locating activities specifically for their child or child's age. Click on the images to view the activities for each category. Please note that all children are different and develop at their own pace.

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a sample of plans for several weeks

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for group time/to build community/to teach topics

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using puppets virtually for PK K - Google Search

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Using Puppets with Very Young Learners - YouTube

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Big List of Companies offering free subscriptions/resources

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Big List of Companies offering free subscriptions/resources

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updated regularly

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from authors, illustrators, scientists......subscribe to the newsletter for daily updates in one place

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Virtual Learning for Friday, March 20th 🌎

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Authors, illustrators, scientists, and others are stepping in as students around the world face school closures. Each day, I'm sharing a newsletter with a list of live-streams for students, as well as other resources. Please feel free to share this list with other educators and families.

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Teachers love their students deeply and want nothing more than for them to have a positive experience regardless of circumstance. So when thousands of teachers heard that they had a mere 24 hours to move instruction online, they naturally started working harder to figure out logistics. But many of us are perfectionists, and this is one case where we shouldn't be. As the country scrambles around for toilet paper, chicken breasts, and hand sanitizer, this is one area we should let go of a bit and perhaps strive for imperfect online learning. Why?

1. One day, or week, isn't enough time to plan an online course

So don't try to. Teachers who virtually teach as a career spend months planning, examining resources, and recording videos. This is not the same thing, nor should it be, as we have very little time to prepare and we will be planning and teaching almost simultaneously as we all figure out what it will look like. Many districts are limiting online learning to review and extension work, rather than demanding new content be taught as thoroughly and efficiently as it is in a classroom. Don't feel the need to overachieve beyond that requirement, as you, your family, and your students have other concerns to attend to.

2. Acknowledge the limitations of learning from home

Before you plan a 50-minute lecture on science theory, consider what it will be like for students to receive and learn in their environments at home. If a student has WIFI and if it's fast enough, they may listen. If their parents aren't panicking in the background about where to get food and childcare, they may listen. If they aren't watching their three younger siblings, they may listen. If their parents are around and forcing them to do school work, they may listen. If they, or a family member, aren't sick themselves, they may listen. If their anxiety is not through the roof, they may listen. This is a lot of if's. Don't make that 50-minute video if you don't have to. Remember ... imperfect online learning.

3. Consider assigning the simplest task: reading

When, in the history of being a student, have your kids had unlimited time to read? Consider minimizing your worksheets, packets, videos, and online lectures, and replace whatever you can with reading. Let them read for fun, for once, without the looming tests and curriculum schedule. Give them fascinating articles to read and host an online discussion board or chat time. Students without WIFI can still access books.

4. Ease up on rules

Limit tests that may time out with slow WIFI, extremely strict deadlines that may not make room for technology problems, and similar rules. Instead, encourage communication with you, and in some cases other classmates. This isn't the time to be more by-the-book or to increase emphasis on grades. In a popular article circulating amongst teachers in the past week, Dr. Rebecca Barrett-Fox suggests everything be open book, open note, and re-doable for a bit. Teachers accounting for the challenge of adjusting to a potential pandemic shows compassion

5. It's time for the mini-lesson to shine (again)

If you are still required to teach new content, communicate new concepts in small sections, videos, posts, or increments to allow students to learn in short spurts of time. That way, they can do ten minutes of work before helping their little sister. A five-minute video seems much more approachable than one that would have replaced a full class period. Also, consider allowing students to make their own videos and to post them, allowing for 30 mini lessons to be posted at once. This obviously would vary based on age and accessibility to technology.

6. Keep communication brief and clear

In speaking with your students' families, be clear about your available times and office hours, as you too will be dealing with all of the stressors of Coronavirus, including teaching from home without childcare. Parents shouldn't be expecting a permanently on-call teacher, so make sure they know when you are available and how to reach you. Reclarify the 24 hours response time you've always maintained on responding to parent emails (or whatever your boundary is).
Need help with online resources? We've built a list with over 70 options here. Feeling overwhelmed? Share your thoughts on imperfect online learning. Join fellow educators in the WeAreTeachers Chat group on Facebook to get support from others just like you.

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Teachers, The Next Weeks of Online Learning Don't Have to Be Perfect

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Teachers love their students deeply and want nothing more than for them to have a positive experience regardless of circumstance. So when thousands of teachers heard that they had a mere 24 hours to move instruction online, they naturally started working harder to figure out logistics.

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all grades - various subjects

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Hand-picked tools for every scenario, all well-suited for use during the coronavirus pandemic.

It's tough in a typical school year to serve each student's unique learning needs, but the coronavirus pandemic has transformed the meaning of meeting all students "where they are." For many, this means converting some or all elements of your teaching and curriculum to distance learning.

We've heard from educators how overwhelming it can be to wade through the dozens of emails and articles with hundreds of "great apps for distance learning" from people and companies that possibly have their interests -- and not yours -- in mind. That's why we've curated this short list of free, quality classroom resources for each grade band and subject area. Each tool has scored well on our research-based ratings rubric. More importantly, each tool is something we think would work well given the unique circumstances of the pandemic. Of course, you'll also want to dig in to their privacy and safety practices, so make sure to check out the privacy evaluations on the review pages (when available).

Elementary school math and science

Elementary school ELA and social studies

Free, expansive digital library unlocks treasure trove of books
Price: Free for teachers
Platforms: iOS, Android, Chrome

K-2 literacy program offers comprehensive, adaptive activities
Price: Free and paid versions
Platforms: Web

Elementary school arts and creativity

Middle school math and science

Middle school ELA and social studies

Middle school arts and creativity

High school math and science

High school ELA and social studies

High school arts and creativity

Check out our Common Sense Selections for Learning to find best-in-class media resources and tools that facilitate great learning experiences for students and educators.

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Distance Learning Short List: Best Free Resources by Grade and Subject | Common Sense Education

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It's tough in a typical school year to serve each student's unique learning needs, but the coronavirus pandemic has transformed the meaning of meeting all students "where they are." For many, this means converting some or all elements of your teaching and curriculum to distance learning.

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need to be adapted for online

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A preschool morning meeting can be a great way to start off the day in your early childhood classroom. Many preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten classrooms have successfully implemented a morning meeting routine into their daily schedules.

If you're wondering what a morning meeting is, why you should have one, and how to get started, then you're in the right place!

Preschool Morning Meeting Ideas

Sometimes, just making one simple tweak to your daily schedule or routine can make the difference between having a good day, or a bad day.

Changing a routine that you've had in place for a long time can be difficult, it's kind of like dieting if you really think about it. You may feel the need to hold on to the way you've always done things because it feels familiar and comfortable.

Starting a preschool morning meeting routine in your classroom is very easy! In fact, if you've ever done circle time, you'll already be familiar with some of the components.

What is Morning Meeting?

A morning meeting is a short period of time where you gather together with the children in your classroom as a whole group.

During this brief time you're going to set the tone for the day by focusing on community building and reviewing the schedule for the day. Are you with me so far? Good! It's really not that difficult - pinky swear!

Why Morning Meeting?

There are many benefits of adding a morning meeting into your daily routine. A morning meeting can help you get the school day off to a great start.

Every morning meeting routine may look a little different according to your program's requirements, but here are the basics of an effective morning meeting routine:

Good Morning or Welcome Song

Attendance

Review the Schedule for the Day

Make a Plan

How to Get Started with Morning Meeting

So, how do we get started with a preschool morning meeting routine to build community in the classroom? The first step is to do what we do best, we sing! Yep, you read that correctly, start your morning meeting with a welcome or good morning song. This song will serve as an auditory signal to the children that your day is beginning.

If you add hand and body movements to your song you'll engage more children. You can even add props to serve as visuals to go along with your song. Now you've got their hands, feet, eyes, ears, and mouths engaged, you're off to a great start! See, I told you this wasn't difficult.

My favorite good morning song is Rise and Shine by Dr. Jean, but there are many others you can choose from.

Attendance

After you sing your good morning or welcome song, you can move into your attendance routine. Your attendance routine could be anything you want it to be. Many teachers use a Question of the Day for taking attendance.

Others use student name cards in a pocket chart or on a magnet board, students put their name cards on the left side of the chart if they are at school and the right side if they are at home.

Whichever method of attendance you use, the most important thing is to look at the chart together to discuss their observations. You can take time to count students present and absent, compare the numbers of absent and present students, and even take time to wish your absent students well.

Daily Picture Schedule

Next, you're going to want to review your daily picture schedule with your students. Having a daily picture schedule is such an important part of establishing successful routines and transitions in your classroom - you definitely don't want to skip this part!

To review your daily schedule with your students, point to the first - or current, picture on the chart and remind them that this is what you're doing right now. Then, point to the next picture as you say "This (name the thing) is what we're going to do next."

Then point to the next picture and say, "After (the thing) then we're going to..."

If there are any changes to your daily routine, this is the time to point them out to the children.

Make a Plan

Now it's time to set the tone for the entire day. Making a plan is very subtle and may not even be obvious to any observers in your classroom.

For example, if you noticed that centers were a little out of control yesterday, you might remind the children that "Today, during center time we're going to be looking for children who are ... (insert desired action)." This is making a plan for the day, you're laying out a plan for the students that will help them have a better day than yesterday.

If your daily schedule is really long, don't spend too much time on each piece, just the most critical ones. Remember, it's important to keep your morning meeting time short and focused to start your day off on the right foot.

Now you can transition to your next activity, which should be an active one to create a balanced schedule. If you're wondering about circle time, that part comes later.

The Teaching Tribe

If you have questions about morning meeting, or any other preschool topic, the best place to get your questions answered is in the Teaching Tribe. We have many printable lessons and on-demand video training to help you be the best teacher you can be! If you want to get on the waiting list for the Teaching Tribe, do it soon so you don't miss the next open enrollment period!

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Preschool Morning Meeting Ideas - Pre-K Pages

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Are you looking for preschool morning meeting ideas? What is a morning meeting? What does it look like in a preschool or pre-k classroom? How do you get started with a morning meeting? Here you'll find the answers to all these questions and more!

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Finding the best ways to do good.

If you're feeling extra anxiety these days due to the Covid-19 coronavirus, you're not alone. This pandemic has us all facing more stress and uncertainty than usual. It also has many of us asking: How do we keep from spiraling into full-blown panic?

As we try to navigate our anxiety about the coronavirus, there's one quote I've been trying to keep at the forefront of my mind. It's by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh: "When the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive."

Tara Brach, an American psychologist and a widely respected teacher of Buddhist meditation, sent out this quote in a recent email newsletter. It prompted me to call her up and ask for some guidance about using meditation to navigate this pandemic.

The first thing to know is that the word "meditation" actually refers to many different practices. In the West, the most well-known set of practices is "mindfulness meditation." That means paying attention, purposefully and non-judgmentally, to your experience in the present moment. It can involve a formal practice - like when you sit down, close your eyes, and focus on feeling your breath go in and out. But you can also practice mindfulness while you read the news, say, or shop for groceries.

I talked to Brach about how we can use mindfulness and other meditative techniques to find balance during the coronavirus crisis, and about why this is not a selfish escape from reality: Many neuroscience studies have shown that meditating can help us regulate our own emotions so we can better pay attention to other people and act more altruistically. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Sigal Samuel

I'm guessing that you, like the rest of us, have been feeling stressed about coronavirus. What have you personally been doing to stay calm and centered?

Tara Brach

Yes, like everyone else, I feel the hugeness of this and I feel fear for my dear ones and for the most vulnerable people in our world. What I've been doing is a mix: walking in nature and taking in beauty; talking to people and feeling our shared vulnerability and connectedness; and doing a lot of meditating. It gives me a pathway back to steadiness that's just immeasurably helpful.

Sigal Samuel

For people who don't have experience meditating but who are looking for a way to avoid sinking into the panic vortex, can you suggest one or two simple meditation practices that would be useful for our current situation?

Tara Brach

Sure. The first step when we get really gripped in fear is to calm our sympathetic nervous system. A simple way to do this is with long, deep breaths. Take at least three full breaths, counting to five with the inhale, and counting to five with the exhale. And with the exhale, intentionally release tension. That begins to calm down the nervous system.

Our breath is often the most helpful home base for coming out of our circling worry thoughts and back into our senses. But we can also come back to the sounds we're hearing in the moment, or the sensation of our hands or feet tingling, or the sight of a tree or table. Coming back to the senses in our body helps us come back to the present moment.[SS: You can listen to a five-minute guided mindfulness meditation here.]

Sigal Samuel

In your new book Radical Compassion, you also offer a short meditation practice called RAIN, which I've found helpful. Can you spell out what the acronym means?

Tara Brach

Yes, I use the acronym because It's an easy-to-remember handle if you're getting caught in fear. It stands for recognize, allow, investigate, nurture. [SS: You can listen to a guided RAIN meditation here.]

First, just recognize, "Okay, I'm feeling fear." Mentally whisper it, and that helps right away.

Then allow it. Just let it be there, don't try to run away or fix it or control it or judge it.

Then investigate it. Begin to come into the body and just feel where the fear is in the body. Find out how it feels and breathe with it, with a gentle quality of attention.

And then nurture. You might just put your hand on your heart and offer a kind or soothing message to yourself. You can say to the fear, "Thank you for trying to protect me; it's okay." I sometimes will say to myself, "It's okay, sweetheart."

Sigal Samuel

I'm curious about the "recognize" part, this idea that when you can name a fear, it loses some of its power over you. What is it about that mental notation that changes the activity in the brain?

Tara Brach

When we're in fight-flight-freeze mode, our limbic system has basically hijacked us, and we lose contact with our prefrontal cortex, the most recently evolved part of our brain, which has to do with executive functioning and making good decisions. When we name what's going on, we start to activate the prefrontal cortex. Mindfulness reconnects us with that.

"The single most important thing that can happen right now in this pandemic is that we feel our collectivity - that we're here to help each other move through this"

Sigal Samuel

Outside of a formal meditation practice, how can we use mindfulness in our daily activities while we're navigating this pandemic? For example, should we be mindful of our news intake - how, and how often, we're taking in updates about the virus?

Tara Brach

I think it's good for all of us to take in the amount of news we need to take in to be informed, but also to know how to turn away from our screens. Listening to beautiful music or going outside for a walk will really nourish us. What the news will do is keep on agitating us. For some people what really works is [to limit news intake to] one time a day, and that can really make a difference.

Sigal Samuel

What about practicing gratitude? I've generally found that my brain can't be anxious when it's busy being grateful.

Tara Brach

Yes. Human beings have a negativity bias. We get very fixated on threats and often overlook goodness and beauty. So it needs to be an intentional practice to celebrate goodness. By that I mean that we actually pause and savor seeing the gleam in our child's eye or watching the new blossoms come out.

Many people get gratitude buddies and, at the end of the day, they'll send a note to their buddy naming three things they're grateful for. That can really lift people up and change the mood.

Sigal Samuel

I think some people in the West see practicing meditation as this very individualistic or even selfish thing, because it's often presented to us as divorced from a broader ethical framework. But in Eastern traditions, meditation has always been part of this broader framework of moral responsibility toward the other. So what would it look like to make sure we don't divorce it from that in the context of coronavirus?

Tara Brach

In China, the word for mindfulness is "present heart." If we keep emphasizing the heart side of things, if we keep offering care to ourselves and others, that's going to make us much more tender and we'll live naturally from a more ethical place. The true impact of meditation is that it actually dissolves our excessive sense of self. It frees up our sense of connection with each other.

But if we think mindfulness is just something I do so that I can feel better in the midst of fear, then it's going to have a much more self-centered feel.

So I think emphasizing the heart practices is critical. One of the heart practices is called lovingkindness. That's where we take time to appreciate the goodness in other people. We might remind ourselves of the health workers on the front lines who are risking their lives to help people who are suffering. Or we might think of someone we know and remind ourselves of their humor, their intelligence, their care. And then we offer them our best wishes.

Sigal Samuel

Someone reading this might think, "Oh, so you're just mentally sending someone a wish like 'May you be free from suffering' - that's not actually doing anything to help them." But I'm guessing the next step is that you also want to convey that to them out loud, right?

Tara Brach

Absolutely. When I wrote Radical Compassion, what I meant by those words is a mature compassion that has three elements to it. First, you're feeling the caring viscerally in your body. It's embodied, it's not just an abstract idea. Second, the care is active and engaged - it actually leads to reaching out. The third part is that it's all-inclusive: I'm not just caring about my sister but also about everybody in every country.

It might be that in the meditation we're simply offering someone a prayer, but after that we're much more inclined to reach out and make that phone call or go get someone groceries or medicine.

The single most important thing that can happen right now in this pandemic is that we feel our collectivity - that we're really here to help each other move through this. And the truth is each one of us can help. We have a real gift to offer each other just by who we are and how we come forward. If we can find an inner refuge of calm, our calm is contagious.

Sigal Samuel

A lot of us are experiencing fear around our mortality right now, and in the West, that's something we don't talk about much. Do you think we should respond to the pandemic by leaning into that - uncovering the fear and bringing it up from the subliminal to the conscious level? Or is that a terrible idea?

Tara Brach

I think it's not going to be a choice to bring it up. We will all be faced with the fear of mortality and the grief of loss. We can't use our normal mechanisms to avoid it anymore.

When things fall apart, it's a really horrible time in the sense that there's so much suffering, but it's also an opportunity for us to wake up our hearts in an unprecedented way. The ultimate gift of meditation is that it helps us come home to a space of presence that is large enough for whatever we encounter. And it's from that space that we can actually live from who we most want to be.

So really the question is, how will you be with the fear and the grief? What is being called forth in you in these times? Who do you want to be? And what kind of world do you want?
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter Future Perfect is funded in part by individual contributions, grants, and sponsorships. Learn more . and we'll send you a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling the world's biggest challenges - and how to get better at doing good.

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"Our calm is contagious": How to use mindfulness in a pandemic

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Finding the best ways to do good. If you're feeling extra anxiety these days due to the Covid-19 coronavirus, you're not alone. This pandemic has us all facing more stress and uncertainty than usual. It also has many of us asking: How do we keep from spiraling into full-blown panic?

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The thought ended almost before it started: "This is so overwhelming." It was all one teacher managed to type before she stopped short, vexed into silence, perhaps, by the sheer size of the problem. In the pregnant pause that followed, undoubtedly, every teacher tracking the unspooling thread-about the dizzying, rapidly escalating viral crisis that was closing schools across the country-recognized the chasm they were all facing as well, and took a deep breath.

In the next few hours, over 500 teachers joined two Facebook conversations about teaching during the coronavirus pandemic, spilling out their concerns and anxieties: What will we do if the schools close for months? How can I shift to online learning if we're closing tomorrow, or even in a few hours? How will special education students be cared for, and IEPs administered? What about children who have no internet access, or who will be required, as Keith Schoch thoughtfully noted, to "become de facto babysitters" for their brothers and sisters. "There is no digital divide, but there is a digital abyss, and America's rural poor are living at the bottom of it," said Anne Larsen, with devastating concision. What if, in the end, the school systems decide that online learning is working just fine, and never reopen?

The panic was all perfectly understandable.

But there were plenty of teachers in the mix who had weeks of crisis experience under their belts by that time-several in Hong Kong and Italy and the state of Washington, for example-and others who had long careers in online and distance learning. In the end, too, there were many fantastic, highly creative teachers providing strategies as fast as the obstacles appeared.

At the highest level, a shift in mindset would be required-even the most optimistic educators conceded the point. There are plenty of strategies and tactics we're covering at Edutopia-and we'll continue to-but here are the crucial emotional and psychological scaffolds that our audience agreed would be needed to teach in this new paradigm.

Expect Trial... and Plenty of Error

Start by being reasonable with yourself. It is, in fact, impossible to shift to distance learning overnight without lots of trial and error. Expect it, plan for it, and do your best to make peace with it.

"I can tell you, now that we're in week 7 of online learning, that much of what you will do will be trial and error," wrote Stacy Rausch Keevan, who was teaching in Hong Kong. "Don't stress about that-it won't do you any good. For my middle school English and humanities classes, I'm offering the same lessons I would normally do live, but in smaller doses."

Acknowledge the Extraordinary

Reset your baseline. We're all operating in the shadow of a global pandemic, and it is disorienting and limiting. Business as usual is unrealistic.

The real "points to consider" are not "the strict adherence to 'regular' conditions and norms," wrote Amy Rheault-Heafield in a reply to a question about how to structure distance learning like more typical learning experiences, "but how to provide a rich experience to all learners who are now without 'traditional' teachers standing beside them in classes."

So while you should try to provide "meaningful activities," cautioned elementary teacher John Thomas, "we should remember that on short notice-and because many of us have limited PD utilizing these tools-we can't tackle everything immediately. In other words, we should give ourselves the time and the permission to figure this out."

Reduce the Workload (for Yourself and Your Students)

If your district allows it, you should plan to do less. Students won't be able to work as productively, anyway-so if you can't scale back you'll be sending them work they cannot do-and your own life and family need added care.

"Feedback from students and families over the last 10 days in Italy is 'less is more,'" commented Jo Gillespie. "Consider that parents are trying to work from home, and siblings are vying for computer and Wi-Fi time. Try Google quizzes using Forms, a reading log, some short live sessions with teachers and classmates, maybe vocabulary extension, maths and geometry problems (but not too many). And that's probably enough."

And Keevan, the teacher in Hong Kong with weeks of experience, confirmed that time and distance play funny games during a crisis: "What would normally take you one class period to teach in the classroom will probably take you twice as long."

No Person Is an Island

Humans are social animals. Working from home, or worse, from quarantine, is isolating and often depressing for both teachers and students.

Make a concerted effort to speak to other colleagues and trusted professionals to provide emotional and psychological context to your work. Teaching at this moment is extraordinarily hard, and you'll need the virtual company of people who are experiencing what you are.

And don't forget to "reach out to students as often as you can," said Keevan, who still teaches classes live despite a (slightly inconvenient!) 13-hour time difference. Or you can facilitate peer-to-peer communication. John Thomas assigns pen pals in his first- and second-grade classes, so that kids with no internet can feel like they belong.

Everyone Thinks They Can't-Before They Can

Some degree of pessimism and self-doubt comes with the territory. Teachers in the Facebook thread advised more perspective-taking and being more patient with yourself: You know how to teach, and you will figure this out in time.

"We are in week 7 and I have three children of my own at home," wrote Salecia Host, a teacher in Tianjin, China, reflecting on the arc of her emotional response to the crisis. "Just take it day by day. It gets less overwhelming and more routine."

Try to remain calm-though you'll have a few moments where that goes out the window-and keep plugging away: "Being open-minded and flexible is key," said Kaz Wilson, who also works in China. "Everyone thinks you can't until you pause, talk it out with folks who are doing it, and know that you'll get through it."

Mind the Gap

Your work will be hard, but there are students facing more severe challenges. Students with no internet or no computer will need support, as will those with learning differences or other circumstances that make distance learning especially difficult. Supporting these students was on almost everyone's mind-it came up dozens of times in the Facebook thread.

"I'm in Italy. Our schools closed a few weeks ago without any previous warning. We shifted to online immediately. It is hard and exhausting," admitted Eleonora Borromeo, before providing a ray of hope. "Equity is an issue. Assessment is an issue. But the students are doing their best and giving us the strength to go on."

Solutions from our audience of teachers focused on the old analog approaches: paper-and-pencil tasks, workbooks and activity packets that can be mailed home, and updating parents and students via phone calls daily.

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Teaching Through a Pandemic: A Mindset for This Moment

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The thought ended almost before it started: "This is so overwhelming." It was all one teacher managed to type before she stopped short, vexed into silence, perhaps, by the sheer size of the problem.

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Opinion

5 essential tips to structure your day in this unstructured time

Yes, it is possible to experience burnout while teaching online.

With the current surge in schools turning to the web to keep instruction going while physical buildings are closed, many teachers are being thrust into teaching 100 percent online for the first time. For some, especially those on the outside looking in, this may seem like a dream. But this shift may take teachers who are already quite exhausted to full-fledged burnout.

In 2011, I made a bold move and began working completely online. My family and friends thought I had miraculously scored a piece of heaven when they saw me working in my pajamas, but what they didn't know was that the reason I had on those pajamas was because I had been up for over 24 hours straight trying to meet a deadline that had crept up on me-and I was severely burned out.

I know what you're thinking: Why did you wait until the last minute to get all your work done? Why hadn't you organized your time better?

It started innocently enough. I would wake up early to usher the kids off to school, then as soon as I returned and logged into the computer, I found myself answering one email after the next, clicking one link after another, browsing one website for information after another. Then, somehow I'd end up scrolling social media in the name of "researching to find valuable resources."

Days would roll by this way. Just because I was working from home didn't mean I was getting more rest. Then add a few all-nighters or near all-nighters, and you have a volatile mix of burnout juice.

So what can you glean from my experience?

You have to treat working from home the same way you would in your classroom-pajamas or not. Even though I was working from my dining room table and not my desk in a classroom, I learned that structure and time management are two of the most essential skills for efficiently teaching online.

I learned some important strategies along the way.

1. Conduct essential self-care activities first, preferably right after you wake. Yes, you should still get up and brush teeth, comb hair, shave, and/or even put on makeup (where applicable) if you know at some point you'll need to be seen-even if only by video. (Importantly, during this time of uncertainty, you do not want to find yourself in an emergency situation in which you have to leave your home quickly. If you're already dressed, you'll be able to do this at a moment's notice.)

You will be tempted to just roll out of bed and tiptoe downstairs for some coffee. Then while you're conducting your morning browse of your notifications, news, and a myriad of other things we check on our phones when we have a quiet moment, you'll be tempted to respond to emails. That morphs into trying to problem-solve, and then you've somehow shifted into completing work activities.

2. Plan your week, and schedule the tasks you need to get done. That means you need to set specific times for specific tasks to maintain structure for your day. While a to-do list is a useful visual tool, if your tasks are not set for specific times and lengths of time, you will ultimately find yourself struggling to get things done.

Schedule the most important, must-get-done today, essential activities first. Checking and responding to emails can seem essential, but it can become a rabbit-trail activity that leads to more rabbit-trail activities that could likely end in hours passing of unproductivity.

Remember to schedule your household chores to determine which chores will get done and when.

3. Set some alarms on your phone to enforce structure. There will be no bells ringing to remind you that valuable time is passing. The key to making this work, is setting realistic time limits on your work. We often underestimate how long a task will take.

4. Meal prep the night before or first thing in the morning, especially if you have children at home. And then be diligent about scheduling those meal and break times logically throughout your day.

Working from home can easily become a marathon of sitting in a chair and snacking while typing away at the computer until your body suffers. Just mindlessly snacking while you work can easily usher in an unhealthy eating habit. You can ward off burnout by carving out adequate time to take a break, actually enjoy what you're eating, and rest your brain.

5. Get out, and get some fresh air as much as possible. Seriously, take advantage of the flexibility that comes with working from home. You could even choose to set up your workstation on your patio or in your yard, if your internet range will allow it. If you have the capability to go to a park or another place you enjoy, do that, too.

Even though structure and time management are important, this is an unusual time in history, so allow yourself some flexibility. Every day won't go exactly according to plan, and that's okay. The point is to keep yourself healthy.

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I've Been Teaching Online for Years. Here's How to Prevent Burnout During a School Closure

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Opinion Yes, it is possible to experience burnout while teaching online. With the current surge in schools turning to the web to keep instruction going while physical buildings are closed, many teachers are being thrust into teaching 100 percent online for the first time.

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identifies which is best for which grades

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Terrific Websites for Science | Common Sense Education

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Terrific Websites for Science is a Top Picks list of 46 apps and websites curated by Common Sense Education edtech editors.

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A good friend of mine is a professor in the Birth-Kindergarten program at a regional university. She told me about current research indicating early math knowledge is just as, if not more, important than early literacy at predicting future academic success.

As a former English teacher and writer, I'm very comfortable with reading to my children and exposing them to rich vocabulary and literature in our home. After conversing with my friend and reading the corresponding research to which she had referred, I feel as though I've been neglectful in promoting early math skills with my sons, simply because I thought early reading skills were more pertinent.

Since learning how very important early math knowledge is, I've been very cognizant of terminology I'm using and activities I am doing with both of my boys, ages 2 and 5.
Why are early math skills important?

Early math skills provide the foundation for the development of rational and logical thought processes.

Children with an understanding of basic mathematical concepts are better able to see the connections between different objects and ideas.

Being able to compare objects and ideas is a critical step towards developing the skills necessary for reasoning, reading comprehension, and other complex processes.

Studies have shown that children who lack math/number knowledge skills in first grade never close the gap and remain behind their peers throughout school and into adulthood.

After learning why early math skills are so important, I began researching activities that would foster this knowledge in my own children. Below are some simple strategies we as parents can use to teach early math skills and stimulate early mathematical knowledge that is so critical to brain development and a child's future success.
8 Strategies to Foster Early Math Learning

1. Refrain from teaching your toddler to count by merely reciting numbers; attach numbers to a noun (i.e. "Here are two crayons;" "Hand me three blocks"). This helps teach quantity concepts.

2. Teach shapes but also describe them (i.e. The rectangle is like a square but tall and skinny; then compare the two shapes).

3. Talk about distance. For younger children, you may ask, "How many steps to your ball?" For older children, you may ask, "Does it take us longer to drive to Grandma's house or to your preschool?

4. Always involve children in daily math activities, such as making change or measuring ingredients.

5. When playing, toddlers should be sorting and matching in regard to color, shape, texture, etc.

6. When playing, encourage three- and four-year olds to recognize numbers, count, recognize geometric shapes and patterns, understand some spatial concepts, select which set is larger than/less than, and identify one-to-one correspondence (the fact that a number actually represents an amount of something).

7. Set timers for certain activities like quiet time, play time, bath time, etc. This helps children begin to understand the passage of time.

8. Examples of grocery store activities include learning colors, discussing shapes, recognizing the aisle numbers, measuring produce/coffee/dried goods, and counting change at the cashier.

Reading to our children will always be important as early literacy is also an integral early learning skill. Along with books and vocabulary, however, ensure that you are also exposing those budding brains to math terminology and concepts. The benefits will be lifelong.
I wrote a column similar to this blog post in the March 2014 edition of WNC Parent.
Other Sources:
Education.com kinderiq.com Huffington Post article on early math skills

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8 Strategies to Foster Early Math Learning - Zealous Mom

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A good friend of mine is a professor in the Birth-Kindergarten program at a regional university. She told me about current research indicating early math knowledge is just as, if not more, important than early literacy at predicting future academic success.

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shortcuts

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Seesaw icons are a great way to make activity instructions more visual and easier for students to follow.

Use the below shortcuts to create Seesaw icons in your activity instructions.

1. Type in the text shortcut in between two : : (for example, :photo:)

2. When you save your activity, the icons will turn into emojis.

The below shortcuts can be downloaded and printed as a PDF here or by clicking on the attachment at the bottom of this page.

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How to use Seesaw icon shortcuts in Activities instructions

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Seesaw icons are a great way to make activity instructions more visual and easier for students to follow. Use the below shortcuts to create Seesaw icons in your activity instructions. 1. Type in the text shortcut in between two : : (for example, :photo:) 2.

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book resources

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from common sense media - an essential resource for parents

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Wide Open School's mission lives on at Common Sense

With schools back in person, we have closed this dedicated distance-learning site designed to guide families and educators through the sudden shift to remote learning.
Discover More Great Resources for Families & Educators
Common Sense is dedicated to providing teachers and families with free resources to help kids learn, grow, and thrive with media and technology. Join our community for more tips and resources to support kids' learning and healthy development.

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We are grateful to our supporters and partners for helping to bring these resources to kids, families, and educators everywhere during a global crisis. It is a testament to the power of creativity, collaboration, and a shared commitment to education and digital access for all.

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Wide Open School's mission lives on at Common Sense With schools back in person, we have closed this dedicated distance-learning site designed to guide families and educators through the sudden shift to remote learning. Discover More Great Resources for Families & Educators

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Whether you go by applied arts, unified arts, related arts, specials, or something else, there is never enough love for what we do. We're often last to get picked to accompany fun field trips, but first called when admins need a warm body to cover a class or duty (amiright?!). And honestly? Some colleagues don't see what we do as essential, academic, or a "core" subject. None of that is true, of course. As far as I'm concerned, specialists are miracle workers! To show collegial love to my fellow specialists, I'd like to highlight some of their inventive Bitmoji virtual classroom ideas!

Quick Links

Distance Learning & Virtual Classrooms

As I stated previously, the best way to combat the divide of trying to engage young learners while distance learning is to create a friendly virtual space to meet them in. In order to do that, you need to think about the content you want to deliver and how you intend on organizing it. Successful Bitmoji virtual classroom scenes are organized, educational, and inviting.

Think of your virtual classroom as a portal to all the learning content you want to deliver remotely. Many of you are recording lessons and uploading them to YouTube. You could make your virtual space a gateway to the content you want students to consume (rather than going directly to your channel and finding the content themselves).

Consider organizing your lessons based on grade level. If you're doing choice-based lessons, each grade level could have it's own color-coordinated slide. All kindergarten classes are red. All first grade are orange, and so on.

It's important that you give students directions on how to engage in the space. Just sending them a link to the space isn't enough. They need to know what to do once they get there. We would never provide lesson materials without directions on what to do. If your virtual classroom is too filled, put the directions on another slide.

Free Stock Photo Websites

When you start out designing a Bitmoji virtual classroom, begin with the background image for the slide. It sets the scene perfectly. You can either search for one or even better, use an image of your own.

There are many sites that have free commercial and personal use photos that don't require attribution. These are labeled CC0 meaning "Creative Commons Zero." Others, however, are allowed for commercial and personal use but do require attribution. Those are labeled as CC2.0. Just be aware of the difference. Here is a short list that may help you get going.

Posing Your Bitmoji

In my previous post, I talked about how to make your Bitmoji. But one common question that's asked repeatedly is how to find the right pose. The key is searching for the best word for your pose. Here's a chart that demonstrates some poses to help gear your search queries. I find this particularly helpful for specialists because it can be challenging to find poses that uniquely match what we do.

But what if you just want someone standing there? Just search the word "pose" and you'll get some of these.

More Tips & Tricks for Your Bitmoji Virtual Classroom

If you read my last post about Bitmoji virtual classrooms, you saw I gave a nice list of tips and tricks. Here are some more.

Kids are OBSESSED with animated gifs. So, include some! And the older they are, the more funny and ironic the gifs should be. They can be cropped to fit a tv, tablet, or laptop screen. Just select the image and then quickly double-click to crop. You can even link to outside content from the gif. There's nothing better than tricking kids into learning. Check out giphy for free animated graphics for nearly every topic imaginable.

15 Bitmoji Virtual Classroom Ideas for Specials Teachers

One of the best features within Google Slides is the REPLACE IMAGE feature. It does exactly what it sounds like it does. First, select a graphic on your slide. Then at the top of the screen, tap on the REPLACE IMAGE button. When the window appears, search for an image on your computer to replace that one with. Why is this so helpful? Say you spent a half hour trying to get magazines and books on a rack. You cropped them to fit perfectly. Simply swap them out!

Stay Fit Challenges

If you want to see what kids are clicking on (and not clicking on), try using a link shortener like bit.ly. It will cloak the link so when students tap it, they won't see the direct name of the link where it leads to. However, you can see roughly how many link clicks that particular item has received. If you're teaching a choice-based class, you can get a sense of what's popular and what's not. This can be helpful data that can inform you future lesson choices. Just be aware that some school servers block these cloaked links.

Add audio to your clips! Check out this great tutorial:

Want to pump up participation in physical education during distance learning? Why not create some exciting challenges! First, create a 5×5 grid. Then fill each with a Bitmojo alongside an object a child might have at home accompanied with an exercise they have to perform. The first have a select amount of time to search for the objects. Then they have a certain amount of time to perform the corresponding exercises. This is a great way to get their hearts racing!

Make Choice the Choice

Promoting choice in your lessons will increase your engagement rate. Think about it: would you rather be told what to do or would you rather have to choose from a list of options? Whatever you teach, think about using different objects to represent those different choices. If it was an art lesson, pencils, paintbrushes, play dough, blocks, and a camera could represent all the different choices you're giving students that week. Depending on which one they click, it could lead to another slide where you have a curated list of activities within that content area. Clicking a pencil would lead to a list of sketchbook ideas. Clicking a paintbrush could lead to painting ideas. Some of these could include links to video content where you're demonstrating techniques.

Sing Your Heart Out

There's something to be said for teachers showing their true colors ( Right, Cyndi? "I see your true colors shining through!). If you love to bring literature into your music lessons, include a bookshelf with your favorite musically-inspired books. Each book could link to YouTube videos that get kids singing, moving, and grooving.

Cultural Exploration

Speaking a foreign language isn't just about the language. It's about understanding how it's culture, it's people, and the unique region of the world that country is in. So why not take your students on a trip there to learn about the sights and sounds from the region? Each graphic in your Bitmoji virtual classroom could link to virtual tours, YouTube videos, and your daily lessons. This is how to make distance learning fun!

STEAM

Add a little art to STEM and you get something way better: STEAM. Include pictures of different devices like laptops, desktops, and tablets. Use them to link to content you're teaching that's saved on your Google Drive or elsewhere. Also, think about doing STEAM stations. Each of the cafe style tables below could represent one station giving kids a choice of activities to engage in.

Get in Shape!

Gymnasiums are naturally very active. And physical education teachers have to be all over the place. So why not make it look that way? Because what's more fun: one of you or more of you?! Bonus points for including clear signage in your slides to students know how to engage in your Bitmoji virtual classroom.

Get your Tech On

Are you head of your district's technology department or a computer specialist? You can get in on the fun, too! Curate a space for your colleagues. No doubt many teachers are learning how to use new technologies for the first time. And you're likely to be asked the same questions repeatedly. Why not gather all your frequently asked questions and design a space to help deliver them to teachers. Add objects in the room like laptops, desktop computers, TVs, routers, and other devices where links to a slide with tips, tricks, resources, and support.

Filed Trip Extraordinaire

Can't go on a field trip? Why not take a virtual one to a place you could normally not venture to? Bonus points for adding in some virtual reality experiences and links to Google Earth within your Slides doc. Discover cities, towns, and historic locations with your students! Also, a scene like this with all those old school TVs would be perfect for the animated GIF idea I mentioned earlier.

Say Cheese!

There are only so many drawing lessons and art teacher can do before kids get bored and don't participate. Why not change it up by designing some photography art lessons? If you recall, I mentioned this in my distance learning post awhile back. You can teach all the elements of art - line, color, shape, texture, value, form, and space - using whatever picture-taking device a student might have. Display some of your student's photos in each week's new Bitmoji virtual classroom scene. Show them you're proud of their accomplishments even though you can't be there in person to tell them.

Field Day Bonanza

Your field day might have been cancelled but there's no reason you can't still host it online! First, create all of your fun activities. Then, design your space. It can be indoors or outdoors. A nice picture of your school's gym of field would be awesome. Lastly, link to each of the activities using bright orange cones. You can even come up with a schedule like you normally would on field day so students can participate in real time. Don't let distance learning stop you from planning field day!

Be a Drama Llama

Create a cool vibe for your drama lessons using snapshots of you school's stage. If you can't get a picture, design your Bitmoji virtual classroom using bits and pieces to make it work. Any wooden floor will do. Throw in a couch, some theater signs, and link to some of your awesome lesson materials and YouTube videos. Bonus points for linking to funny animated GIFs of facial expressions that get kids laughing and smiling.

Coordinate with Specialists

Why not coordinate links to your lesson materials for all specialists in one Google Slide doc? This is such a fun way to continue creating a sense of community within your school. You can even use a snapshot of your school in the background, inside or out, to show school pride!

Beat Your Own Drum

Drum up some spirit by including different groups of instruments like string, wind, brass, percussion, etc. Each one of those instruments if clicked on could lead to a list of lessons. Adding your online office hours and classroom posters is a great way to top off your room!

Check Mic, One Two One Two!

Making your Bitmoji virtual classroom space warm and inviting is a great way to invite students to participate in your content area. Adding in instructional classroom posters, decorations, and other trinkets that might personalize the space is also awesome. But if you really want to know your students are engaging with your lessons, include a clickable link back to a self-correcting Google Form that students fill out to demonstrate their understanding of the lesson. It's tough getting work back during distance learning. So make it as painless as possible to receive.

I Can, Too!

Here a can. There a can. Everywhere an "I can" statement! Organize your weekly lessons using AIM or I Can statements. Add a title at the top of the slide so students know these will be all the virtual lessons for each particular week.

Templates to Make Your Bitmoji Virtual Classroom

Some of the ideas being shared by other teachers are simply amazing! But if you don't have the time to craft your own virtual classroom, I've gone ahead and created some for you.

The bonus here is that not only will you not have to spend the next several days searching for the right graphics, you won't have to be concerned about copyright issues.

All of the graphics in my sets have been designed by me and are for personal use. That means you can create as many rooms as you like to send to your students.

And because the pieces move, you can rearrange your space however you like. You can make multiple rooms using the same graphics in a different placement. I've also included 5 virtual classroom backgrounds. So you have all the space you need to spread out your lesson materials.

So far, I've designed spaces for visual arts, gym, music, and now media specialists!
Leave a comment if you think I should make one for theater teachers and what I should include. Love hearing your thoughts!

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15 Bitmoji Virtual Classroom Ideas for Specials Teachers

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Whether you go by applied arts, unified arts, related arts, specials, or something else, there is never enough love for what we do. We're often last to get picked to accompany fun field trips, but first called when admins need a warm body to cover a class or duty (amiright?!).

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(BH Course) Bitmoji Adventures - a Video Series by Avra

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63 at home science activities

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Searching for kid-friendly science experiments? Don't worry if you never made it past biology: These 63 science experiments for kids are super-easy and a lot of fun to boot, as kids are exposed to a wide variety of scientific concepts. It's a great way to spend quality time together as a family and who knows, mom and dad may end up learning a new thing or two, too.

Besides, children are born scientists. They're always experimenting with something, whether they're throwing a plate of spaghetti on the wall, blowing bubbles in the bathwater, or stacking blocks into an intricate tower only to destroy it in one big swipe. As they get older, you may decide to enroll them in a FREE online coding class to get a leg up in today's digital world, a STEM summer camp, or work together on their very first (or final) science fair project. But you can actually do some pretty mind-blowing, hands-on science experiments at home using stuff you probably have lying around the house.

Find more STEM fun for kids of all ages in our STEM and Science Experiments for Kids Guide.

Food-Based Science Experiments for Kids

1. Learn about the crystallization process by growing rock candy in a glass.

2. Mix Diet Coke and Mentos and stand back to watch the explosion. (Really! Stand back.)

3. Use lemon juice to make invisible ink that can only be seen when held up to a heat source.

4. Make homemade ice cream in a bag: shake salt, ice, cream, and sugar vigorously until the consistency is right, then enjoy.

5. Drop Pop Rocks into a bottle of soda and then place a balloon onto the opening to watch it inflate.

6. Plop oil into water to see that they really don't mix; try it with a variety of liquids to make a rainbow of stripes.

7. Build a container for an egg that protects it from breaking and then test it out by dropping it from on high.

8. Make your own butter by shaking a jar of heavy cream.

RELATED: 25 Exercise Games to Do with Kids Indoors

9. Force an egg to fit into a bottle by creating a suction using heat.

10. Change how an egg floats or sinks in a glass by adding salt to the water.

11. Turn milk into a material that acts like plastic using white vinegar.

12. Mix a batch of bread dough and separate it into several different bowls; place them in different places (outside, inside, in the dark, in the light) to see which environment yeast thrives in.

13. Grow mold on bread by putting slices in different environments (in a bag in the dark, in a bag in the sunlight, out in the open, in the refrigerator); see which one gets moldy first.

14. Have your kids close their eyes and hold their nose and see if they can still identify foods by taste.

15. Dabble in some kitchen science while making this yummy ricotta cheese.

16. Your egg will be so embarrassed when you leave it naked! Dissolve the shell right off an egg by simply placing it in a cup of vinegar.

17. Map their taste buds by dipping Q-tips into different flavors and placing them on different areas of your tongue.

18. Explore the fat content of different foods by wiping them on a brown paper bag; fatty foods leave behind a greasy spot, while fruits and vegetables leave no trace at all.

Slime, Putty, and Oobleck Science Experiments for Kids

19. You will be squeaky clean after creating this satisfying non-sticky putty by simply combining cornstarch and dish soap.

20. Whip up some Oobleck, a fascinating non-Newtonian fluid that can act like a solid or a liquid depending on certain conditions.

21. Microwave Ivory soap (or any soap that floats) to create a bizarre puffy soufflé.

22. Borax plus glue equals homemade slime.

Outdoor and Nature Science Experiments

23. Grow a bean in a clear cup to watch the roots grow down and the stem grow up.

24. Blow bubbles outside when temperatures dip to the single digits and watch them freeze.

25. Craft a duck call by cutting the ends of a straw into a point, then blow.

26. Set up a row of bottles with varying amounts of liquid and then blow across the openings to hear the different tones.

27. Make a sundial by placing a stick in a vertical position and a circle of rocks around it marking each hour.

28. Cut ice in half using a fishing wire-the pressure melts the ice faster than the air.

29. Make a rainbow by holding a glass of water up to the sunlight with a sheet of paper behind it to catch the colors.

30. Create a tornado in a bottle by taping two plastic bottles together neck to neck-one filled, the other empty-and swirling it quickly.

31. S'more science please! Harness the power of the sun and turn a pizza box into a solar oven and roast some delicious treats for the whole family.

32. Place white flowers in colored water and watch how they soak up the hues.

Science Experiments for Kids that Fizz, Bubble, and Foam

33. Mix baking soda, vinegar, and glitter for a sparkly volcano.

34. Make " elephant toothpaste" (a.k.a. an impressive large foam) out of soap, yeast, and hydrogen peroxide.

35. This glitter does more than shine, it sparks a scientific experiment to see how far germs can spread.

36. Baking soda and vinegar react to make these popcorn kernels hop around a jar of water.

37. Create a colorful and fizzy reaction by adding a drop of food coloring and a little baking soda to a sliced lemon.

38. Discover how to keep your pennies shiny by experimenting with different cleaning solutions.

Physics and Physical Science Experiments for Kids

39. Make a Rube Goldberg machine featuring a series of moving pieces that affect one another: marbles, dominoes, books, and most any surface.

40. Build a rocket balloon car using a Styrofoam tray, a balloon, and a straw; watch how air pressure moves it across the table.

41. Use a plastic bag and cup to build a parachute for a light toy.

42. Looking for hands-on science experiments? Ask your kids to do simple tasks with their hands, feet, and eyes (like grab a ball, stand on one foot, or wink) to see which side is dominant.

43. Build a marshmallow catapult out of a plastic spoon, rubber bands, and Popsicle sticks.

44. Test your reaction time by having a friend drop a ruler between two almost closed fingers. See how fast you can grab it.

45. Explore the scientific concept of density while taking a bath. Ivory soap boats do more than just float, they demonstrate density.

RELATED: 40 Snow Day Boredom Busters for Kids

46. Engineer a tall tower using red party cups and sheets of paper. How high can you go?

47. Fold a paper airplane and then bend a corner to see how that changes its flight path.

48. Find your blind spot by moving a card with a speck on it until you can no longer see the spot.

49. Build a miniature windmill using a few simple objects. Watch it spin faster or slower based on the direction of the "blades."

50. Bounce a ball on top of another to watch how the energy transfers to the top ball and leaves the bottom one "dead."

51. Demonstrate centripetal force by spinning a bucket of water on a rope in a vertical circle.

The Rest of Our Favorite Science Experiments for Kids

52. Dish soap, pepper, a toothpick, and a little bit of water are all kids need to feel like science wizards. Watch a little drop of soap chase pepper away in the Petter & Soap Experiment.

53. Make a lava lamp by pouring vegetable oil into water and then sprinkling salt on it to make the blob of oil move.

54. Fashion your own bouncy balls with this recipe to see how various shapes bounce differently.

55. Use a balloon to amplify sound by holding it to your ear.

56. Budding meteorologists can create shaving cream storm clouds and Technicolor raindrops.

57. Make static electricity by rubbing balloons on clothing or shuffling on the carpet with socks, then zap someone with a quick touch.

58. These gummies won't be so yummy in your tummy, but you can watch gummy bears grow by placing them in water, salt water, and vinegar.

59. Build your own periscope using a milk container and carefully angled mirrors that allow you to see things above or behind you.

60. Be a DIY spy with this fun fingerprint experiment. Collect fingerprints using one of these methods, and then dive a little deeper with a forensic study of fingerprint patterns.

61. Use food coloring and water to see how combining primary colors makes secondary colors.

62. Learn about surface tension by dropping food coloring into milk and watch as the colors move when you add some soap.

63. Fill a plastic bottle to the brim with water and put it in the freezer; in a few hours the bottle will crack because ice expands.
This article was first published in 2014, but it has since been updated. Additional reporting and photos by Ally Noel except where noted.

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63 Easy Science Experiments for Kids Using Household Stuff

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Searching for kid-friendly science experiments? Don't worry if you never made it past biology: These 63 science experiments for kids are super-easy and a lot of fun to boot, as kids are exposed to a wide variety of scientific concepts.

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"kids yoga" "yoga for kids" "yoga for children yoga story for kids" "children's yoga" "yoga adventure for kids" "kindergarten yoga" "preschool yoga" "kids me...

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YOGA | MINDFULNESS | RELAXATION FOR KIDS! Screentime that gives kids SUPERPOWERS! ⬇️ D O W N L O A D T H E C O S M I C K I D S A P P ⬇️ 🍏Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cosmic-kids/ 🛍️Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cosmickids 🖥️ Desktop (great for teachers!): https://app.cosmickids.com/ 📺 Roku: https://rb.gy/44r8d -------------------------------------------------------------------- Why watch on the App?

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Looking for songs to help your kids improve their hand washing skills? Teaching preschoolers and toddlers to wash their hands can be tricky because it requires several different steps. One way you can help your kids learn how to wash their hands is to use music and songs. These skills are especially important to prevent spreading germs like the Coronavirus.

Hand Washing Songs for Preschool

Teaching children how to was their hands using songs is much easier than telling them what to do. Songs are great ways to help young children remember the important steps necessary for washing their hands properly.

If you really want your kids to do a good job of washing their hands to prevent the spread of illnesses like COVID-19, they'll need to learn how to wash the tops and bottoms of their hands, in between their fingers, and their thumbs and wrists.

This fact sheet from the CDC recommends washing your hands and also explains when to use hand sanitizer.

Hand Washing Songs for Preschoolers

There are lots of great songs about washing your hands on YouTube you can use at home or in your classroom. But who has time to search through all the songs out there and preview them to be sure they're good? I've done all the hard work for you, here are my favorite age-appropriate hand washing songs that will help your kids learn how to wash their hands and prevent the spread of germs.

These hand washing tips from the centers for disease control help explain when and how to wash your hands.

Wash Us, by Hooray Kids Songs and Nursery Rhymes

Germ Smart, by Saskatchewan Health Authority

Hand Washing Posters

These hand washing posters and resources can also help you teach toddlers how to wash their hands to prevent the spread of germs like the Coronavirus.

Germs for Kids, by The Kiboomers

Wash Your Hands Song, by The Singing Walrus

Wash My Hands, by Busy Beavers

Which song is your favorite? Let us know in the comments below.

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Hand Washing Songs for Preschool Kids - Pre-K Pages

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Looking for songs to help your kids improve their hand washing skills? Teaching preschoolers and toddlers to wash their hands can be tricky because it requires several different steps. One way you can help your kids learn how to wash their hands is to use music and songs.

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77 ideas + 77 more

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Okay teachers, help me...there was so much demand for the 1st two "77 Simple STEM Ideas"...I'll make a 3rd if:
1⃣ at least 77 people like/RT this
2⃣ everyone pitches in some new ideas in the comments
#COVID19 #RemoteLearning #BetterTogether #STEM

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Okay teachers, help me...there was so much demand for the 1st two "77 Simple STEM Ideas"...I'll make a 3rd if:
1⃣ at least 77 people like/RT this
2⃣ everyone pitches in some new ideas in the comments
#COVID19 #RemoteLearning #BetterTogether #STEM https://t.co/wC8Y41WpHI

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Okay teachers, help me...there was so much demand for the 1st two "77 Simple STEM Ideas"...I'll make a 3rd if:
1⃣ at least 77 people like/RT this
2⃣ everyone pitches in some new ideas in the comments#COVID19 #RemoteLearning #BetterTogether #STEM pic.twitter.com/wC8Y41WpHI
— dailySTEM (Chris Woods) (@dailystem) March 18, 2020

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Okay teachers, help me...there was so much demand for the 1st two "77 Simple STEM Ideas"...I'll make a 3rd if:
1⃣ at least 77 people like/RT this
2⃣ everyone pitches in some new ideas in the comments
#COVID19 #RemoteLearning #BetterTogether #STEM https://t.co/wC8Y41WpHI

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Okay teachers, help me...there was so much demand for the 1st two "77 Simple STEM Ideas"...I'll make a 3rd if:
1⃣ at least 77 people like/RT this
2⃣ everyone pitches in some new ideas in the comments
#COVID19 #RemoteLearning #BetterTogether #STEM https://t.co/wC8Y41WpHI

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Okay teachers, help me...there was so much demand for the 1st two "77 Simple STEM Ideas"...I'll make a 3rd if:
1⃣ at least 77 people like/RT this
2⃣ everyone pitches in some new ideas in the comments
#COVID19 #RemoteLearning #BetterTogether #STEM

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leveled books for kids 12 and under

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early reading

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here.
Kid Yoga videos are giving teachers and parents an incredible tool to help children learn to:

I must admit I was a bit skeptical to jump on the kid yoga bandwagon. Did it really work? We started doing family yoga, and my kids loved it. During turtle on the rock, I would crouch over, and my daughter would lie on her back, balancing on me. Soon, we started looking forward to our weekly yoga class. It was both a great way to bond and also a perfect workout and stress reliever.

One day as I was reading through Facebook, I noticed that a bunch of preschool teachers mentioned they had started using YouTube kid yoga videos for their classes, and they were seeing great results in behavior and all around mindfulness. I had to check it out! And wow, they were right! The kid yoga videos were incredible.

No longer do you need to go to a yoga instructor or pay for classes. You can get one right in your home or classroom - and it's FREE! I especially love that the Cosmic Kids Yoga videos tell a story at the same time. Other yoga videos have songs, and some are even led by kids.

There are even great yoga books! These three are some of my favorites. All of them are available for Kindle, as well as in hardcover or as a board book.
Good Morning Yoga Good Night Yoga: A Pose by Pose Bedtime Story You are a Lion and Other Fun Yoga Poses
We do a morning yoga video now, and my kids can't wait to find a new and exciting video to follow along. Here are some of the absolute best kids yoga videos.

Kid Yoga Videos

Frozen | A Cosmic Kids Yoga Adventure!

Children's Yoga Class with Ally Ford

KIDS YOGA | Crab Pose | Boketto Yoga 4 Kids

The Sun Dance Kids Yoga/Music Video by Bari Koral Family Rock Band

Kickapoo the Kangaroo | A Cosmic Kids Yoga Adventure!

Yoga for Kids! By Yoga Today

YOGA FOR KIDS By We Heart Yoga

Parsnip The Cat | A Cosmic Kids Yoga Adventure!

Yoga for Kids - Spring Yoga By Gaia

Tiny the T-Rex | A Cosmic Kids Yoga Adventure!

Wake Up Routine - Yoga for Kids - Tiny Turtle Yoga

ZEN MEDITATION FOR KIDS | itsy-bitsy Boketto

5 Minute Yoga flow, for kids!! | Boketto Yoga

Mimi the Mermaid | A Cosmic Kids Yoga Adventure!

Yoga for kids: Alphabet Yoga D V M & YOGA

The Very Hungry Caterpillar | A Cosmic Kids Yoga Adventure!

Kids Yoga with Sheila Palmquist

Sport Yoga - Active Yoga for Kids Ages 3+ (Kick It)

4 Minute Yoga for Kids With Fightmaster Yoga

Lulu the Baby Lioness | A Cosmic Kids Yoga Adventure!

I'd love to hear what your favorite kid yoga video is!

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here. Kid Yoga videos are giving teachers and parents an incredible tool to help children learn to: I must admit I was a bit skeptical to jump on the kid yoga bandwagon. Did it really work? We started doing family yoga, and my kids loved it.

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ABC's 123's PK/K and up

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Starfall Education: Kids Games, Movies, Books & Music for K-5 and above

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At Starfall, children have fun while they learn - specializing in reading, phonics & math - educational games, movies, books, songs, and more for children K-5 and above.

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fun games with the learning you want

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read alouds at home

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In many places, students returning to school buildings will be required to wear masks. These strategies can help elementary students adjust.

Bill Graham / The Meridian Star via Associated Press

Our brains do not like surprises-they love to make predictions by finding patterns that are familiar, and they learn from associations, connections, and patterned experiences. But as schools begin to resume in late summer, there will be many unfamiliar experiences: new routines, schedules, and guidelines. Especially for young students, it's going to be challenging at best to adjust to wearing masks for extended periods.

States, districts, and schools that are returning to in-class teaching will have a variety of regulations and protocols, and we need to think collectively about how we can help young students follow those protocols. Parents can help by getting their kids used to wearing masks for increasing intervals even before school begins, and I have some suggestions for how we might introduce masks to students while creating safe and predictable environments to allay the expected fear and anxiety these changes could create.

It will be particularly important for educators to share their own feelings and sensations when wearing the masks in the first few weeks of school. When we share our vulnerabilities, worries, and questions, we can sit beside our students in creating a safe, open space for them to express their concerns and worries.

Connections and trust will need to be our priorities at the onset. What props, hats or other pieces of clothing, fictional characters, or objects could you share to introduce yourself and create positive associations and connections right away? How could you reveal your passions, interests, and personal stories while wearing your mask during that first day or week of school? I've shared the strategies below with teachers all summer. They have started implementing these with pre-K students, who report loving the activities and feeling a sense of calm.

In my work as a professor of education, I'm fortunate to be able to spend two mornings a week in K-12 classrooms. When I meet my new fourth-grade students in a few weeks while I'm wearing my mask, I will bring a plastic brain, a pair of flip-flops, and a picture of my family's rescue dog, Nellie. The students will learn a little about me through these objects as I in turn, will invite them each day for the first few weeks to share their passions and interests through objects or images.

Strategies for Starting the Year in Masks

1. A calming bag: Tangible items such as Band-Aids, mints, a personal note or encouraging sticker, extra pencils, etc. can often feel comforting when someone notices our fears or worries. Rather than share these items, at the moment it might be best if teachers create a bag for each student-if a grant or other funding is available-or send home a list of items so that parents and guardians can create the bags. Students keep them at school and use when needed. What would you put in a calming bag?

2. New routines: Teachers should be purposeful about creating classroom routines to ease any embarrassment, discomfort, worry, or anxiety students may have about wearing masks. Many of our students will not walk in already accustomed to wearing masks, so routines and predictable structures can help them feel calm and ready to learn. Routines can include things like drawing or journaling thoughts.

3. Connections with parents: A letter to parents outlining class procedures and routines will ease their anxiety and that of their kids. Teachers can also use this letter to invite parents to share the celebrations and challenges their children have experienced over the past several months.

Here are a few questions to consider asking parents:

What are the two or three best ways I can create a positive experience for your child this year?

Please share your favorite memories of your child. What makes him or her smile and laugh?

What do you need from me that would be helpful for your family?

What are ways I could help your child adjust to the mask this year?

Are there any changes at home that would be helpful for me to know? (You can frame this as a yes/no question, and give parents the option to explain if they wish.)

How can we work together this year? Is there anything you would like to teach or share with our class this year?

4. Face masks and superhero powers: This is a new focused attention practice designed around masks. Ask students what superhero they are, and ask them all to create a power pose. As they hold this pose, have them breathe in three deep breaths, hold for a couple of seconds, and then breathe out a superpower they wish to send to themselves, someone they care about, or the world.

5. Morning meeting questions: These are some questions teachers can use in the first week or two as students get used to their masks and each other.

How does a mask protect us?

Do you know of any superheroes that wear masks?

Maybe we could all decorate our own paper masks? What colors, shapes, and designs do you want on your mask?

6. Theme weeks: The first weeks of school are going to feel rough for many educators and students. Sometimes redirecting our attention away from our masks can more easily occur if we focus on something else. One way to do that is to designate theme weeks with a variety of associations and connections. Ideas include things like Favorite Color Week, Animal Week, Favorite Tradition Week, Artist Week, Music Week, and My Buddy Week. You can also ask students for suggestions so that they feel empowered by the themes. Teachers and students together can also come up with activities for the themes.

7. Emotion reading practice: We are capable of reading facial expressions from the eyes up. Teachers can spend a few minutes a day practicing this. Have a student wearing a mask think of a feeling and try to express that with their face, and ask the class to guess the emotion or feeling. Another option is to put little masks on the emojis on feeling charts. Students can work to become experts at reading facial expressions of people wearing masks, which could be a fun ritual that reduces anxiety and fear.

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In many places, students returning to school buildings will be required to wear masks. These strategies can help elementary students adjust. Bill Graham / The Meridian Star via Associated Press Our brains do not like surprises-they love to make predictions by finding patterns that are familiar, and they learn from associations, connections, and patterned experiences.

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The author suggests a conceptual framework to help teachers understand the critical but elusive concept of student agency.
Fifteen years ago, when I was a new teacher, a kindergartner taught me about student agency. His name was Jackson, and one day I noticed him drawing furiously in his journal. "Tell me about your picture," I said. "Bush hog," he replied.

Having lived in cities my whole life, I had no idea what bush hogs were. I wanted to show Jackson that I was interested in his artwork, though. So I tried many times to engage him in discussion about these animals. "What do bush hogs eat?" I asked. "Where do they live?" He would shrug or say something too soft for me to hear, until finally, after a few days of this, his patience wore thin and he burst out, "Bush hogs don't eat anything. They're farming equipment!"

We both laughed, and I explained that I didn't know much about farming. Then something fascinating happened - something that I, as a new teacher, had never seen before: All of a sudden, Jackson became a leader. Since I obviously had a lot to learn about farms, he decided, he would come up with important agricultural topics for us to discuss. And from then on, whenever he had time to write and draw, he would produce a new chapter book about farm life and read it aloud to the class.

I didn't know what to call this shift in Jackson's attitude - from compliant and reserved to fully engaged and excited to direct his own learning - until several years later when I began studying for my doctorate. What my student had developed, according to researchers, was "agency," which, broadly speaking, refers to a student's desire, ability, and power to determine their own course of action (whether that means choosing a learning goal, a topic to study, an activity to pursue, or a means of pursuing it).
Two challenges
The development of agency is often described as a critically important goal for all students. Countless school mission statements speak of the need to help young people become independent thinkers, for example. Colleges and universities expect high school graduates to be self-driven learners. And business leaders are forever calling on K-12 education to prepare the next generation of problem solvers and entrepreneurs.

However, two obstacles have stood in the way of recent efforts to foster student agency in schools.

First, test-based school accountability - as promoted by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top - created pressure on teachers to provide highly directive instruction, offering few opportunities for students to make choices about what and how they learn. For example, consider the plight of Kayla, a teacher with whom I work in my research. Kayla, who teaches in a school with an 88% Native American student population, found that the state's prescribed literacy curriculum lacked attention to indigenous culture, so she adapted it to give students options to study oral storytelling, visit and learn from community elders, and read culturally responsive texts. However, because the school was designated as not meeting adequate yearly progress, Kayla's supervisors were desperate to raise test scores, and they reprimanded her for straying from the state's pacing guide and text selections, which they believed to be more closely aligned to state tests.

Teaching for student agency requires taking risks and adopting an adaptive stance toward instruction.

According to many personal accounts and research studies of educators' behavior over the last 15 years, Kayla's story is not unusual. When teachers make it a priority to strengthen their students' sense of agency - say, by encouraging them to choose topics, texts, and activities that meet their linguistic, cultural, and instructional needs and interests - their decisions can easily be vetoed by supervisors who insist that they follow a prescribed curriculum (McMurrer, 2007; Onosko, 2011).

Second, even if educators agree in principle that students should become agentic and independent, they may struggle to translate that goal to classroom practice, or they might find themselves at a loss for words, unsure how to talk about such issues. Several months ago, for example, I asked a group of teachers to tell me their thoughts on student agency. I happen to know that some of these teachers routinely encourage their students to pursue self-directed research projects, contribute to decisions about class rules and structures, and voice their opinions in class discussions. However, when I posed my question, they gave me a blank stare and asked, "What's student agency?"

The precise definition of student agency remains elusive not just among educators, but also among scholars who study it. While it is easy to give a broad definition of agency - in general, it refers to students' ability to define and act on their own goals - it can be hard to pin down the details. For example, is agency a psychological concept, having to do with an individual student's motivation and confidence? Does it have more to do with personal and social development, such as the effort to shape an identity for oneself in school (Holland et al., 1998)? Is it better to think of it in political terms, having to do with students' power to challenge teachers' biases or unfair school practices (Toshalis, 2015)? Does it have to do with organizational structures, such as rules about how students are supposed to dress and behave in school? Or, at a deeper level, does agency have to do with how people use language, including the ways teachers control classroom discussions, allow students to talk freely, or encourage them to speak with authority (Johnston, 2004)?

In short, exactly what are we talking about when we talk about agency?
Three kinds of agency, and three core practices
While researchers talk about student agency in a dizzying assortment of ways, I've found in my own research that their various approaches can be grouped into three main categories (see Figure 1): Some define agency in terms of students' dispositions, others define it in terms of student motivation, and others focus on the position students occupy in the classroom.

The first category includes research that focuses on students' personal dispositions, such as the extent to which they can be described as entrepreneurial, hopeful, generative, creative (Garud, Hardy, & Maguire, 2007; Oakeshott & Fuller, 1989; Tran & Vu, 2017), goal-directed, determined (Snyder et al., 1991), or even resistant or rebellious. On this dimension, developing a sense of agency has to do with becoming willing and eager to take action in response to problems and opportunities.

The second includes research that focuses on students' self-efficacy, including the ability to make plans, regulate their own emotions and behaviors, and reflect on their own skills (Bandura, 1989). On this dimension, agency has to do with learning how to control and direct one's feelings and beliefs so as to complete tasks and act effectively.

And the third includes research into the ways people participate in groups, communities, and organizations. On this dimension, agency has to do with understanding one's social, cultural, and historical environment (Vygotsky, 1978; Wenger, 1998) and deciding how to take action in that context.

To promote student agency, then, teachers must address all three of these dimensions. They must support (or at least try not get in the way of) students' efforts to define themselves as independent learners. They must ask students to reflect on what they've learned, what has been hard for them, what has gone well, and why. And they must create a classroom environment, norms, and rules that allow students to make meaningful decisions about what they want to learn and how they want to participate in the group.

While I didn't know it at the time, all three of these elements were present in my interaction with Jackson. When he asserted that he knew more about farm life than I did, I chose to go along with it, respecting his desire to take charge and teach me some things. In the process, he reflected on what would be the best way to share his knowledge of farming, and he learned that in my classroom, he was welcome to make that decision.

Not to suggest that it's always so simple to help young students become self-starters, however. As a new teacher, I was lucky to have a student like Jackson, who made it so easy to help him. But for most teachers, most of the time, there are serious tensions involved in providing opportunities for students to harness their agency. In particular, elementary-level teachers often struggle to decide how much control they need to reserve for themselves and how much autonomy they can realistically hand over to their students.

Recently, for example, I observed the class of a 2nd-grade teacher, Ms. Nenko, who invited her students to choose their own books, identify interesting themes, and then lead their small groups in discussing them. In theory, the activity promised to engage all three dimensions of student agency. In reality, though, the students floundered, unsure how to get a book discussion started, so Ms. Nenko stepped in and took charge, saying, "I can see we need some help. Let me model for you how to start a discussion in your group."

At this point, the challenge for Ms. Nenko was to figure out precisely how much scaffolding her students would need in order to take over the book discussions for themselves. She could easily have canceled the activity, reasoning that 2nd graders are just too young for that amount of autonomy. In this case, however, she decided to try again. This time she provided students with a set of open-ended question prompts they could use to get things started, and they proceeded to have lively discussions.

While it is easy to give a broad definition of agency - in general, it refers to students' ability to define and act on their own goals - it can be hard to pin down the details.

In other words, efforts to promote student agency always require a balancing act. Teachers never cede control entirely, and - especially in classes of young children - they always have to be ready to provide necessary supports, structures, and guidance. More specifically:
1. Teachers should be alert to students' readiness to assert themselves, guide their own learning, and make their own choices.
In the early grades, teachers should always be on the lookout for students to reveal knowledge, skills, cultural experiences, and language proficiency that they may want to bring into the curriculum. The moment that Jackson made it clear that he knew more than I did about farm life, I was presented with a dilemma. I chose to let him run with his interests, but I could just as easily have decided to redirect him, on the grounds that he didn't seem ready to take control in that way and would be better off following directions. Every day, teachers face dozens, if not hundreds, of these kinds of split-second decisions. I worry that if they're not predisposed to look for opportunities to cultivate student agency, then their default choice will be to tell students to get back on task.
2. Teachers should scrutinize their own classroom structures, materials, and assignments to make sure they allow for students to assert agency.
Student agency flourishes when school activities, materials, and structures afford young people some amount of freedom to: a) make significant decisions about their learning; b) voice their opinions about issues that matter to them, and c) challenge what they're taught, especially if their background equips them with a competing perspective. If they're committed to helping young children develop a strong sense of agency, then teachers must think carefully about the way they organize the classroom, the materials they make available, the kinds of discussions they encourage, and the activities and projects they assign.
3. Teachers should err on the side of giving students too much choice and freedom. And if students aren't ready for it, then teachers should scale it back (rather than giving up on it entirely).
Teaching for student agency requires taking risks and adopting an adaptive stance toward instruction. Adaptive teaching is individualistic and specific to students' linguistic, cultural, and instructional needs. As a result, adaptive teachers make decisions in the moment based on student inquiries, instructional needs, and their cultural and linguistic strengths (Vaughn & Parsons, 2013). Without an adaptive approach to instruction where teachers modify what they are doing based on what their students are doing, opportunities for agency are stifled.

The call for developing student agency is needed now more than ever in schools, and current educational reform efforts would be enhanced if policy makers and administrators would recognize the potential of student agency. By providing educational contexts in which agency can be nurtured, educators create contexts where students are in charge of their learning and imagine alternative possibilities and pathways. Such rich learning spaces can provide generative contexts where students can problem solve, imagine, and create new possibilities.
References
Bandura, A. (1989). Perceived self-efficacy in the exercise of personal agency. The Psychologist: Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 2, 411-424.

Garud, R., Hardy, C., & Maguire, S. (2007). Institutional entrepreneurship as embedded agency: An introduction to the special issue. Organization Studies, 28 (7), 957-969.

Holland, D.C., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Johnston, P.H. (2004). Choice words: How our language affects children's learning. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

McMurrer, J. (2007). NCLB year 5: Choices, changes, and challenges: Curriculum and instruction in the NCLB era. Washington, DC: Center on Education Policy.

Oakeshott, M. & Fuller, T. (1989). The voice of liberal learning: Michael Oakeshott on education. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Onosko, J. (2011). Race to the Top leaves children and future citizens behind: The devastating effects of centralization, standardization, and high stakes accountability. Democracy and Education, 19, 2, Article 1.

Snyder, C.R., Harris, C., Anderson, J.R., Holleran, S.A., Irving, L.M., Sigmon, S.T., et al. (1991). The will and the ways: Development and validation of an individual differences measure of hope. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 570-585.

Toshalis, E. (2015). Make me! Understanding and engaging student resistance in school. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Tran, L.T. & Vu, T.T.P. (2017). "Agency in mobility": Toward a conceptualization of international student agency in transnational mobility. Educational Review, 1-21.

Vaughn, M. & Parsons, S.A. (2013). Teachers as innovators: Instructional adaptations opening spaces for enhanced literacy learning. Language Arts Journal, 91 (2), 81-93.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York, NY: Cambridge.

Citation: Vaughn, M. (2018).Making sense of student agency in the early grades. Phi Delta Kappan 99 (7), 62-66.

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Making sense of student agency in the early grades - kappanonline.org

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The author suggests a conceptual framework to help teachers understand the critical but elusive concept of student agency. Fifteen years ago, when I was a new teacher, a kindergartner taught me about student agency. His name was Jackson, and one day I noticed him drawing furiously in his journal.

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At first, the provenance of the math problems was a mystery. The chalky, pastel words, numbers and symbols appeared on sidewalks near a small park in San Diego not long after the COVID-19 shutdown began. Families taking walks paused to ponder the patterns. They discussed possible solutions. They took photos to share with others. Within a few days, teacher Traci Jackson , who lives a few blocks away, started receiving messages from friends and neighbors. "Is that you leaving math everywhere?" they asked. Jackson's secret was out, but her public math mission wasn't over.

Changing the environment of math changes how people respond to it, said Jackson. She first observed this shift a few years ago when, inspired by teacher and blogger Sara Van Der Werf , she posted a math problem in the hallway at her school in Poway Unified School District. Jackson watched with delight as not only students but colleagues and parents lingered by the problem, their curiosity piqued. Instead of feeling pressured to get the right answer quickly, passersby were willing to think about the problem for a bit or get it wrong and revise their thinking . Now, with schools closed, Jackson is replicating that magic by decorating her neighborhood with sidewalk math problems .

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How Sidewalk Math Cultivates a Playful, Curious Attitude Towards Math | KQED

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At first, the provenance of the math problems was a mystery. The chalky, pastel words, numbers and symbols appeared on sidewalks near a small park in San Diego not long after the COVID-19 shutdown began. Families taking walks paused to ponder the patterns. They discussed possible solutions.

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Using Book Creator in Pre-K / Kindergarten - Book Creator app

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Book Creator is perfect for age 3 and upwards. From the tutorial to the simple-to-use interface, the technology takes a back seat to creating great books.

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Yoga Moves to Relieve Tension in the Neck & Shoulders

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yoga "yoga videos" "free yoga videos" "yoga for weight loss" "yoga for beginners" "morning yoga" "home yoga practice" "yoga with adriene" "at home yoga"

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WELCOME to Yoga With Adriene! Our mission is to connect as many people as possible through high-quality free yoga videos. We welcome all levels, all bodies, all genders, all souls! If you're brand-new to yoga, check out my Yoga For Beginners and Foundations of Yoga series.

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Squats

Squats are also a full-body movement, engaging your core while strengthening your glutes and quads. Robin Arzon, an RRCA certified running coach, NASM certified personal trainer, and Schwinn spin instructor, says to relax your upper body and keep your shoulders away from your ears. Stand with your feet spread, shoulder-width distance apart, and begin to engage your core and bring your hips back. Sit back as if you were aiming for a chair that was 90 degrees or lower. "You don't want to overextend your lower back, [as to] protect your spinal column," she says. "You want to get below the 90 degree angle with your hips and glutes to really fully activate your glutes and quads." Your weight should be closer to the balls of your heel, so that you could wiggle your toes at the bottom of the move. This enables you to push yourself back up. To make this quick workout move more challenging, hold a weight in your hands.

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Sneaking In These 60-Second Exercises Can Transform Your Body

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Squats are also a full-body movement, engaging your core while strengthening your glutes and quads. Robin Arzon, an RRCA certified running coach, NASM certified personal trainer, and Schwinn spin instructor, says to relax your upper body and keep your shoulders away from your ears.

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How to get unstuck from your anxiety.

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In this emotional equivalent to an ultramarathon, it's key to have some stress-reducing strategies available that work quickly and efficiently to help you hit the reset button.

Here's why: Struggling with chronic worry gets in the way of effectively managing your emotions. Unfortunately, many people who experience distress try to escape their unpleasant emotions by distracting themselves in ways that ultimately backfire.

If you suspect you might be one of them, ask yourself whether you have a tendency to judge your emotions - it's a common thing to do. But it can fuel a vicious loop of feeling, then avoiding the feelings and feeling even worse. Pushing away feelings is like trying to force a beach ball underwater: They will pop back up. Instead, notice and normalize difficult emotions; ideally, negative feelings, including fear, can motivate us to solve problems.

So rather than dealing with anxiety and uncertainty by getting lost worrying, then chasing short-term fixes with longer-term consequences, like procrastinating, using food or marijuana to cope or relying on benzodiazepines - the anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax - it's helpful to experiment with quick strategies that will empower you. These strategies are not necessarily a cure, but can help lower the intensity of overwhelming emotions, allowing you to recalibrate to better deal with challenges you face.

My patients often reflect that an additional perk of strategic coping is boosting your sense of mastery - the hope that arises when you stretch yourself and accomplish something difficult, like coping with your anxiety in a productive way.

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Focusing on relaxing sounds reduces stress. In research spearheaded by Dr. Veena Graff, an assistant professor in the department of anesthesiology and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania, preoperative patients were assigned either to music medicine - listening to Marconi Union's " Weightless " - or prescribed a benzodiazepine. Remarkably, serene music proved nearly as effective in easing patients' jitters as the medication option, with no side effects.

To honor your unique taste, explore different options and create a playlist that you find comforting when you need a break. Keep in mind that although it can seem cathartic to hear songs that validate your emotions (for example, listening to lyrics about heartache while feeling lonely), research on inducing varying mood states concludes that we can improve our experience with a more uplifting soundtrack. "Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear," as Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote in "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain."

Marsha Linehan, a professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Washington, popularized an exercise in dialectical behavior therapy to regulate intense emotions that involves immediately lowering your body temperature by creating a mini plunge pool for your face. This sounds odd, but it activates your body's dive response, a reflex that happens when you cool your nostrils while holding your breath, dampening your physiological and emotional intensity.

To do it, fill a large bowl with ice water, set a timer for 15 to 30 seconds, take a deep breath and hold your breath while dipping your face into the water. While this isn't conventionally relaxing, it will slow your heart rate, allowing blood to flow more easily to your brain. I love watching my clients try this over our telehealth calls and seeing firsthand how quickly this shifts their perspective. Just being willing to do this, I tell my clients as they prepare to submerge, is a way to practice being flexible.

One of my favorite ideas that never fails to fill me with gratitude, no matter what else is happening, comes from the mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn, who likes to say, "As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you." In "The Healing Power of the Breath," Drs. Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg offer a range of exercises to promote resilience. One of my favorites: Slow your breathing down to six breaths a minute by consciously inhaling and exhaling (to practice this timing, you can use a secondhand and inhale for five seconds, exhale for five seconds, and repeat four times, or try a guided recording). Paced breathing offers a host of physiological benefits, like reducing your blood pressure, which helps promote a sense of tranquillity. When people tell me it feels challenging to breathe in a certain way when they feel panicked, I tell them to start with alternative soothing activities, like music, and work their way up to paced breathing.

Another way to stay present rather than spin into a crisis is to notice if you are engaged in thinking that isn't helping you. Our interpretations of events supercharge the intensity of our emotions. After all, anticipating, "This will go on for years!" in a moment of anguish will only inspire more hopelessness. But mindfulness, or learning to see more clearly as opposed to jumping to conclusions, is a nice remedy for anxiety. One brief way to enter the moment is known as "anchoring," a popular strategy.

The Coronavirus Outbreak ›

Frequently Asked Questions

Updated August 4, 2020

I have antibodies. Am I now immune?

As of right now, that seems likely, for at least several months. There have been frightening accounts of people suffering what seems to be a second bout of Covid-19. But experts say these patients may have a drawn-out course of infection, with the virus taking a slow toll weeks to months after initial exposure. People infected with the coronavirus typically produce immune molecules called antibodies, which are protective proteins made in response to an infection. These antibodies may last in the body only two to three months, which may seem worrisome, but that's perfectly normal after an acute infection subsides, said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University. It may be possible to get the coronavirus again, but it's highly unlikely that it would be possible in a short window of time from initial infection or make people sicker the second time.

I'm a small-business owner. Can I get relief?

The stimulus bills enacted in March offer help for the millions of American small businesses. Those eligible for aid are businesses and nonprofit organizations with fewer than 500 workers, including sole proprietorships, independent contractors and freelancers. Some larger companies in some industries are also eligible. The help being offered, which is being managed by the Small Business Administration, includes the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. But lots of folks have not yet seen payouts. Even those who have received help are confused: The rules are draconian, and some are stuck sitting on money they don't know how to use. Many small-business owners are getting less than they expected or not hearing anything at all.

What are my rights if I am worried about going back to work?

Should I refinance my mortgage?

It could be a good idea, because mortgage rates have never been lower. Refinancing requests have pushed mortgage applications to some of the highest levels since 2008, so be prepared to get in line. But defaults are also up, so if you're thinking about buying a home, be aware that some lenders have tightened their standards.

What is school going to look like in September?

It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California's two largest public school districts - Los Angeles and San Diego - said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won't be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation's largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There's no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.

Start by physically centering yourself by digging your heels into the floor - this evokes a feeling of being grounded in reality. Then take a moment to observe: What am I thinking? Feeling in my body? Doing? Then ask yourself: Is my response: A) Helpful? B) Aligned with my values now? Or C) Related to future worries or a past problem? While we can get stuck in specific thoughts, stepping back to more generally decide if those thoughts are helpful can get us out of rumination mode. It may also help to tape a list of these prompts on your computer to remember to take a step back and refocus when your thoughts are only making things worse.

If you struggle with physical sensations of anxiety, like muscle tension and feeling like you can't get enough air, a counterintuitive yet important way to manage is to practice bringing on those sensations in more quiet moments to improve how you tolerate stressful ones.

Learning to repeatedly welcome physical symptoms allows you to stop seeing them as catastrophic. In a recent therapy group I led on Zoom, my clients prepared to try this by ordering thin coffee straws. I set my timer for a minute as they pinched their noses and tried to breathe only through the straw.

We also worked on replicating the other sensations they associated with fear, like muscle tension, dizziness and shortness of breath. We held a plank, spun in circles and ran in place. Some people were surprised that the practice experience was worse than the anxiety they normally felt. Others found it was similar, which felt liberating - they didn't have to wait for the feelings to catch them off guard - and instead could purposefully habituate themselves to them.

Recently, at the end of a long day of video calls with patients, my 5-year-old daughter asked, "When will the germs go away?" After removing my 3-year-old's sneaker from my 1-year-old's mouth, I saw a request from a client about an urgent check-in. I practiced paced breathing and pulled up our nightly dance party playlist (by request: Justin Timberlake's "Can't Stop the Feeling") before discussing my daughter's feelings and returning to work.

Now I hope you create your own plan with the strategies above. By practicing managing your emotions, you'll experience a sense of freedom in your life. I don't know about you, but I'd chase that over any mindless short-term alternative.

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How to get unstuck from your anxiety. Credit... By In this emotional equivalent to an ultramarathon, it's key to have some stress-reducing strategies available that work quickly and efficiently to help you hit the reset button. Here's why: Struggling with chronic worry gets in the way of effectively managing your emotions.

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If you are a sleep deprived teacher you may not be aware of the term woodpeckering, but you've probably done it. It happens the day following a bad night's sleep. You're sitting in a long meeting and you can barely keep your eyes open, so you prop your head up with your hand. Next thing you know, you are jerking your sleeping head back to its upright position. Do this a few times and you are woodpeckering.

I thought I knew sleep deprivation when I did my medical internship in hospital. That year I frequently went 36 hours with no sleep. When I finished my residency in neurology, I welcomed the promise of full nights of sleep ever after. It went pretty well for the next 10 years until I became a school teacher and experienced a whole new level of sleep deprivation.

Teachers' working hours go far beyond the 8am to 3pm schedule of kids in school. There are hours spent at faculty meetings, correcting homework, preparing for the next day - and then there is the worrying. Nothing I ever did in a hospital emergency room or doing CPR required the intense mental energy needed to keep 30 kids attentive enough to learn what I was teaching.

Good teachers are like jugglers keeping a dozen balls in the air so come nighttime, with alarm set for 6am to finish grading papers, memories of the day that's gone - including the students who didn't understand something, forgot their lunch or were embarrassed by wrong answers - become sleep-resistant barriers. Add to these financial stress - potential loss of income from spending cuts and job losses - and you have cycle of insomnia with its band of unwelcome consequences.

What is the impact of not getting a good night's sleep?

With inadequate sleep comes irritability, forgetfulness, lower tolerance of even minor annoyances, and less efficient organisation and planning. These are the very mental muscles teachers need to meet the challenges of the next day. In wanting to do a better job the next day, the brain keeps bringing up the worries that deny it the rest it needs.

Studies of teachers' response to high job strain reveal that they spend more time than most people ruminating about work-related issues and their brains take longer to unwind. Sleep hours suffer as well as sleep quality.

We need sleep to think clearly, react quickly, and create memories. It is during the later hours of sleep (especially between the sixth and eighth hour) when the brain releases the neurochemicals that stimulate the growth of the memory connections. The average teacher is reported to sleep six hours a night, falling short of the most valuable sleep time.

It is also during sleep that the brain has some its most profound insights and does some of its most creative problem solving. During the day, the neural networks for highest cognition are kept busy directing the rest of the brain's moment-to-moment decisions, choices, prioritising, and just getting through the day. At night, these executive control circuits are free from those distractions. As seen on brain imaging, these regions can be extremely active during sleep.

After such brain activity, the subjects often awaken with solutions to problems, new insights, and ideas for creative innovation.

How to get a good night's sleep: tips before bedtime

Increasing sleep time from six hours or less to eight hours promotes the growth of the brain connections that increase memory up to 25% and restore emotional calm, alert reflectiveness and job efficiency. Here are some general and teacher-specific tips:

1. The best sleep hygiene includes regular sleep and wake schedules - even on weekends. Exercise is also good, but avoid vigorous exercise in the two hours before bed. Vigorous exercise releases adrenalin and noradrenalin, both stimulants that could delay falling asleep. Vigorous exercise before bed also means it will take longer for your body to cool down to the lower temperature that promotes sleep. That said, calming music and gentle stretching, yoga, and progressive muscle relaxation (going through each muscle group and tensing and relaxing it) before getting into your cosy bed is great.

2. Thinking about what you eat and drink before bed also has an impact. You may think you are avoiding caffeine, but look carefully at teas, soft drinks, cold and headache medications where caffeine may be hiding. Alcohol near bedtime might help you fall asleep, but when it wears off, you'll wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling back to sleep.

In the normal cycle, deeper REM sleep does not come until several hours in. Alcohol before bed results in early onset REM thus helps with falling asleep. However, after several hours, the early REM is followed by sleep fragmentation - frequent awakenings. One lies in bed awake and come morning does not feel refreshed. The environment in which you sleep should also be cooler as this is more sleep conducive.

3. For teachers, bedtime rituals can clear your brain of that ruminating about work-related issues so why not have a warm bath with relaxing music before you go to bed?

4. If some worries do wedge themselves into your sleep cycle, write them down on an external notecard. Most importantly, let your last thoughts include self-recognition for the vital work you do and drift to dreamland recalling the day's school successes and the faces to which you brought smiles.
Judy Willis is a neurologist and former teacher. She writes books and does international presentations about how the brain learns best.

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Teacher's guide to sleep - and why it matters

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If you are a sleep deprived teacher you may not be aware of the term woodpeckering, but you've probably done it. It happens the day following a bad night's sleep. You're sitting in a long meeting and you can barely keep your eyes open, so you prop your head up with your hand.

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Over the course of my over forty years as an educator and researcher, I've learned that teachers are often incredibly altruistic and devoted to making a positive difference in children's lives. But too many of them are not well prepared for the social and emotional demands of today's classroom. Stressful conditions-like high-stakes testing or students with severe psychological problems-can lead us to feel discouraged, burnt-out, and ready to quit.

Most teacher training focuses primarily on content and pedagogy, overlooking the very real social, emotional, and cognitive demands of teaching itself. Luckily, learning and cultivating skills of mindfulness -the ability to stay focused on one's present experience with nonjudgmental awareness-can help us to promote the calm, relaxed, but enlivened classroom environment that children need to learn. Mindfulness can also help us to be more effective at reducing conflict and developing more positive ways of relating in the classroom, which can help us feel more job satisfaction.

How does mindfulness do this? By training our minds consciously to become more aware of our inner and outer experience, and learning how to manage our emotions.

In my new book, Mindfulness for Teachers, I outline several mindfulness practices-including focused breathing, open awareness, loving-kindness, and others-that teachers can use in the classroom, whether they want to invoke a sense of mindfulness in the classroom or to become a more mindful person, in general. These practices can help a teacher to slip into a mindful presence when it's most needed, allowing us to pay better attention to the learning environment and our students' needs within the classroom.

Here are some of the many ways that developing mindfulness can help us be better teachers.

1. Mindfulness helps teachers understand our own emotions better

When I teach, I sometimes notice that my mind is so focused on thinking about what I need to do and how to do it that I'm not paying attention to the present moment. I have expectations about how things ought to be and I become attached to them, rather than noticing and accepting how things actually are.

This causes distress, making me emotionally volatile, which in turn affects my perceptions and makes me more sensitive to threat. I may imagine a student's disruptive behavior is intentionally designed to interfere with my teaching when in fact it is the normal behavior of a child who needs help with his self-regulation. If I take his behavior personally, I may lose my temper and say something that makes matters worse.

Practicing mindfulness can help teachers to recognize our emotional patterns and proactively regulate how we behave, responding in the way we want to rather than reacting automatically. It can also help us to savor the positive moments in our job-when we feel the joy of true connection with our students or resonate with the joy and excitement our students feel when learning clicks for them.

2. Mindfulness helps us communicate more effectively with students

During my first year of teaching I had no idea how to get my students to pay attention to my lessons, respond to directions, or behave appropriately. I thought that if I was nice to my students, they would like me, want to please me, and do what I wanted them to do.

However, I was wrong. My students didn't respond or behave that way at all, and, day by day, my frustration grew to the point where I was impatient and snapping at them.

One day a supervisor came to observe my teaching and gave me some important feedback: She told me that I was saying "okay?" at the end of many of my instructions to students, giving them the message that whatever I asked of them was optional. No wonder they were so unresponsive!

After that feedback, I began to monitor myself to break this bad habit, and this helped me see how mindful self-awareness could help me succeed as a teacher.

3. Mindfulness helps us manage students we find difficult

All teachers have problems with particular students who misbehave in the classroom. Mindful awareness helps us attend to what's happening with a child to cause them to misbehave.

Sometimes students misbehave because the environment is inappropriate for their developmental stage-for example, we can't expect kindergarteners to sit quietly listening to an adult talk for long periods of time. Children exposed to trauma in their lives tend to be hyper vigilant-which consumes a lot of cognitive resources, and can lead them to learn more slowly than other students or to be overly sensitive to changes in environment.

Nonjudgmental awareness is an important aspect of mindfulness, too-one that involves accepting things as they are in the present moment. When we first practice mindful awareness, we often notice how hard it is not to judge. But, as we observe ourselves engaging in judgment, we become more aware of it in the moment, our mind begins to settle, and eventually our tendency to judge subsides.

Judgment often induces feelings of guilt and shame. Sometimes teachers judge their students harshly and unconsciously use guilt and shame as management techniques with their students-probably because they've learned these techniques as a child from their own parents. But there's plenty of evidence that this approach doesn't work. Rather than encouraging children to behave, it promotes resentment, distrust, and retaliation.

Mindfully recognizing our emotional responses toward students may help us understand why they are behaving the way they are. If we feel annoyed, the behavior is likely attention seeking. If we feel threatened, the behavior is likely a bid for power. If we feel hurt, the behavior is likely an attempt at revenge, and if we feel discouraged, the student is likely giving up. These feelings can help us respond more appropriately to the underlying issues of our students, and help us shift from a negative appraisal to a state of compassion.

4. Mindfulness helps us set up a positive learning environment

There is a mistaken belief among many teachers that we can and must control our students' behavior. This sets us up for power struggles, where our attempts to control are likely to backfire.

It's far better to create and maintain an effective learning environment by learning to control ourselves. We can control how we communicate, how we behave and where we position our bodies in space. We can set and reinforce expectations and limits. And, we can control the classroom physical space so that it supports learning.

A kindergarten teacher I know couldn't get his students to stop running in the classroom, even after repeated reminders, and he was getting very frustrated. But, once he became mindful of the fact that his classroom furniture was arranged to create distinct "runways" in the class space and remembered that children have a natural inclination to run in open spaces, he could see what needed to be done: he moved the furniture to block the runways, and the children stopped running.

Knowing what's going on in your classroom and with your students is critical to your ability to orchestrate the social-emotional dynamics and the physical spaces that are conducive to learning. Practicing mindful awareness helps you develop the skill of paying attention in the present moment and learning to see what's truly happening in your classroom, allowing you to come up with better solutions to problems you see.

5. Mindfulness helps strengthen our relationship with students

Research on effective classroom management points to the importance of teacher-student relationships. We can set up great management systems involving guidelines and limits, but if our students don't trust and respect us or think we don't respect them, we're in for some challenges.

Giving each student our full mindful attention for even a short period of class time gives them the message "I see you." By making a connection with our students, we let them know we value them as individuals.

Because the goal of school is learning, we naturally tend to signal to students that we value high academic achievement. However, we need to be mindful when we see students displaying non-academic attributes, such as helpfulness, friendliness, creativity, problem-solving, and conflict resolution, and to communicate that we value these as well. Students feel connection with teachers when they know their teachers truly see them and appreciate them.

6. Mindfulness helps us slow down when we need to

Sometimes as new teachers we can be overly concerned about getting through our lesson plans and can unconsciously start to rush. Slowing down and deliberately pausing for a moment of mindfulness can give us time to ask ourselves how we are feeling, what's happening in the classroom, and what our students need at that particular moment. It also models mindfulness for our students.

The speed at which students process information varies. Some students process auditory information very quickly, while others tend to have more visual or sensory-motor strengths. Younger children require more time to process than older children, though adults often forget this. No matter their ages, students process information better when there are given a little extra time, and consciously creating pauses throughout a lesson helps support learning.

Too often teachers forget to pause after asking a question or interrupt student pauses and hesitations, not giving students a chance to think through their answers. Pausing is helpful during lecturing (to give students time to absorb the information and consolidate their thinking) and during student work periods (to give students uninterrupted time to figure things out for themselves). It can also generate feelings of suspense and expectation, enlivening the classroom.

If we rush because we are anxious, we may miss these opportunities to deepen learning. Mindfulness can teach us to wait and be patient and to time our pauses appropriately.

7. Mindfulness helps us build community

Students have a basic need to belong to and contribute to a community. We can foster a sense of community by modeling caring and other prosocial behaviors, instituting caring routines, and mindfully listening to our students.

To cultivate a community of learners, we can provide students with opportunities to collaborate with and help one another-for example by having students work together in groups where each student has a specific task that contributes toward the outcome. Collaborative learning gives students the opportunity to help others and to reflect on the experiences and needs of others, which promotes empathy and perspective taking.

Another way to build community among students is through joint service learning projects, where students work together on giving back in some way to their community. Mindfully taking note of different student strengths and challenges can help teachers make these shared work opportunities enrich student learning and can help build a positive classroom climate.

In all of these ways, mindfulness can help teachers to be the best they can be and bring out the best in their students. Being able to approach a classroom with a sense of calm understanding and the skills to intervene appropriately can make learning a pleasure for everyone.

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

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Seven Ways Mindfulness Can Help Teachers

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Patricia A. Jennings explains why teachers should cultivate moment-to-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, and surroundings.

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a padlet of additional choiceboard and hyperdoc examples - including the underlying pedagogy