We are about to enter our 3rd week of home learning. Where we live, teachers are beginning to get guidance as to what home learning should look like and my kids are beginning to get guidance and activities to work on during the week. With that in mind, I am going to switch up this post this week and provide you with some resources that I have found over the past week that might be helpful to you or may give you and your family a fun way to learn something new. If you have a Baby Shark fan in your house, here is a fun video for you to watch while practicing good hand washing and cough/sneeze catching techniques! Thank you Pinkfong and some of our favorite Nick Jr characters for this gem! Have little ones in the house? Dr. Katy Huie Harrison with Undefining Motherhood has a post with 25 Toddler and Preschool Activities at Home. Do you have a student at home who is struggling with their distance learning on a computer? Control Alt Achieve has an article from 2016 that has some tips and tricks on Chrome Extensions for Struggling Students and Special Needs. Do you love someone with Autism? A team at UNC has created an online toolkit for those supporting students with Autism during this time of home learning. Have you or someone in your household been wanting to learn how to play that guitar or ukulele collecting dust in the back of the coat closet? Fender is offering free online lessons. Have you been wondering how your toddler is able to complete all the activities you had planned for the day in about an hour? I have some back up for you! This website has many great fine motor activities great for 2 and 3 year olds. Are your little ones having trouble with social distancing? This video may be a good place to start a discussion about it if you haven't had one already...or if you need to have one again. (I know it has been a topic of conversation almost daily in our house). Is your child about to start distance learning with Zoom...and you have no clue how to help them set it up? Someone has made an instructional video just for you! This link takes you to a teachers pay teachers free download that gives you a few home learning choice boards for your preschooler and kindergartner. Access the whole collection of School House Rock on YouTube! (You just clicked on it didn't you?...not just for the kids! :) ) This article tells you about 33 National Parks that you can explore as a family from your home! I hope that you and your family have a wonderful, healthy week full of learning and fun! We've still got this!
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We are now a week into this new reality of working and schooling from home. I will say that it was definitely a week of learning and I am going into this week with a different mindset. I have learned that my family needs a basic outline of what we are going to do. I have come to the conclusion that we are typically on the go so much that our natural at home stance tends to be more of a relaxation mode. We need to work to find a better balance. I have asked the kids to start a wish list and every evening before bed we will talk about what we will do the next day. It will be a mixture of things that we need to do and things that we would like to do. This way we all wake up in the morning on the same page and with some direction and purpose. As we all head into week 2, I have added to the list of resources (so take a look!) and I have put together another week of lesson and activities ideas for you to use if you wish. We got this! Where I live, in a matter of 24 hours the structure and routines of our daily lives changed significantly with the spread of COVID-19. When our routines get upset and simple things that we typically take for granted are no longer givens (like children going to school, parents going to work, and being able to find cold medicine and toilet paper at the grocery store) it can cause many emotions and some stress. Know that I am keeping you all in my prayers. You’ve got this! With school closings, it has been amazing to see the response from the vast majority of humans. While there are articles about people not following the social distancing recommendations and others hoarding hand sanitizer and toilet paper, I have been overwhelmed by so much good. Resources are being offered from just about every type of business out there for the benefit of the community. Amazing teachers world wide are finding each other in Facebook groups to collaborate and support one another; answering questions and sharing their ideas and creations with other educators. Humans are helping other humans in simple ways that are making a big difference. I would like to make a very, very small contribution as well. My Facebook feed has been bombarded with so many amazing resources for teachers and parents to take advantage of to keep their students and families engaged while schools are closed. Here are two google docs: a compilation of some of these resources (I will try to add new ones as I find them) and a table with the activities/resources I plan to use with my 3rd-5th graders this week at home (Note: I have a tendency to over plan and we may not get to everything everyday!). Please check back! I plan on sharing my planned activities/resources each week as I compile them. If your kiddos are younger or older than mine, don't worry, the first google doc has a little something for everyone! While we have this “time-out” from our regularly scheduled programs, I encourage you to also take walks, cook together, play board games, sing silly songs, have dance parties, make up new games, read in blanket forts (with flashlights!), color, lay on the floor and play with toys, build Lego creations, and, well, you get the idea. Learning can happen in so many ways! |
my momma hatI always love the way this hat looks on me. It's not always an easy hat to wear, but one that brings me so much pure joy. Archives
April 2020
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