Did your classroom suddenly find itself immersed in online instruction? Your students are starving for social interaction. Your academic instructional success is now even more dependent on building community and shared experience. It’s the glue that will hold your classroom together and bring cooperation and respect during this stressful time. Time to roll out some fun.
Break up your week with show-and-tell. Your students will forever try to wave items at the screen as they get used to the new normal. Tell them up front that they will have a certain number of minutes on a specific day to show and share instead. They will look forward to that day and save up their sharing.
Run a remote class project: civics, yearbook, or cookbook, dance-off.
Yoga and mindfulness. Focus your students at the start of the school day with this 2-minute, 5-finger breathing technique (and 4 others bundled in). You can start building your students mindfulness and meditation with this fun and easy entry-level activity. For tomorrow, send a note to the parents to ask them to find a thick blanket or yoga mat for the use of their student. Pro-tips: Don’t let your students do this on heights, join them, and remind them that trying something new is hard, and every body can do different things, especially the first time. Tomorrow, you can level up with some Harry Potter Yoga. For older kids, try grown-up yoga options.
Students can play students remotely with some old-fashioned battleship. Draw your own grid board on a piece of paper, you need not have more.
Themed days: crazy hair, pajama day, favorite literary character, and so on. Just because you are online, doesn’t mean that you can’t do it.
About MAGE: We are a not for profit, parent-and-teacher-volunteer founded private gifted school in the City of Chicago. As a school, we have been hard at work on Blended Classroom option for our fall term, due to demand from down-state and out-of-state students within day-trip driving distance who need acceleration. Suddenly, we had to implement our plans 7 months early! This took some creativity and hard work, but we thought we’d share some of our successes and lessons learned with you as you are going through this hard time. Our full-time program, including the new online option has open enrollment. Students must qualify as per our Admissions Criteria that can be found here. There is a parent interview and a required shadow, along with a teacher recommendation component and a qualifying test document submission. Our process is slow because of our all-volunteer admissions team but we are working to streamline the process.