Preparing for At Home Student Learning

If you had asked me one month ago if I thought I would have to be preparing for my students to spend 2 or more weeks at home learning their lessons instead of being in the classroom with me, I would have thought you were crazy.   It just seems so surreal that something like this could happen.

Yet, here we are.

I was told three days ago that I would need to come up with a plan for 2 weeks of learning that my students would be able to do independently (read: without a teacher) and still further their education.  Instantly, I was stressed out.  This was uncharted territory and I was just unsure what to even do.

And I figured if *I* didn't know what to do, *YOU* probably didn't either.   Below is a list of all of the resources that I came up with to use with my students (and a few more too ;)  )  

To begin with, I created this calendar that I thought would be useful to my students and their parents to keep all of the learning organized.  It is a basic checklist of all the things that the kids need to do while they are away from school.  This calendar includes a mix of paper and digital resources for my kids.  

You can get an editable version of it here.  Just plug in what works best for you students.  I sent a hard copy of this with my students (since I knew we were going to be closing down) and a digital copy to their parents. 

I created a digital Book Summary Log for my kids.  Now, usually I am not a book log kinda gal. I just find them to be less useful for my own instruction.  However, with the kids being away, I can't discuss the books with them.  So I made a very simple, easy to use Book Log.  You can get a copy for yourself here.

Wonderopolis.org is also a wonderful site that I am assigning my kids.  There are articles on interesting and timely topics for the students to choose from.  They will write a summary and make an inference on each article that they read.

There are also many resources that are free on Scholastic.com due to the school closures.  

The kids will also be doing some SBAC practice on LumosLearning.com  It is free and SO helpful to get the kids thinking about THE TEST (because, like it or not, the kids test almost immediately after we get back from the closure)

For writing, I am assigning two of my digital Paragraph of the Week files for the kids.  Since you are here on my blog, you probably need writing resources too.  So here is Week 1 and Week 2 I am sending to the kids (if you would like the entire digital file for year round use, you can get that here.)  Each of these weeks are formatted the same way that the kids use on paper.  The only difference is that it is digital.  

Each day for homework, my students complete a spiral math page.  I wanted to keep that continuity for them, so I converted two weeks to digital.  If you teach 3rd grade, you can find it here.  Your students should be able to do all of the skills here, as we are nearing the end of the year anyway.  You can get 5th grade here (4th is on its way)

In math, my kids are using xtramath.org (fact practice that is always free and always super useful!)   My kids also LOVE Prodigy and Zearn.  Both are free for students to use.

For science, I assigned the kids several of the Mystery Science lessons.  Mystery Science has put many of their lessons out for free because of these school closures.  They are the same, exact lesson that you would get in the paid membership, which are amazing!  Doug leads the kids through the science so they should have no problem learning the lessons and concepts.

BrainPop has also set their service free for the duration of the school closures.  It is a MUST USE site for all things social studies and math.  You can sign up your class with this link here.  

Those are the things that I am assigning my students while they are away from school.  A few others things (like our math book and Benchmark Advanced) are paper textbooks that I did not include in this list.  My hope is that this list of things we are doing above sparks some ideas for you and makes this time a bit less stressful.