A Digital Day in K

Has the transition from in person to distance-learning been difficult for you this year? I’ve had moments where it has truly made my head spin! What has made it even more difficult is bouncing back-and-forth between live and digital instruction at different points in the year. If that has been your situation, I really feel for you! It hasn’t been easy!

My biggest take away from this season of teaching has been to find consistency. Whether we are in the classroom or online, finding routines that you can incorporate into any teaching situation has made it easy for my students to seamlessly transition. Today, I want to share with you some of my favorite online teaching tips that have helped me smoothly run kindergarten online! 

Visual Reminders

I have written about using visual reminders in the classroom before. But when you are online, using visual reminders doesn’t seem as obvious. However, we have several behavior expectations that we hold for students when they are learning online. These expectations are different from what they need to do in the classroom. Things like keeping their mic turned off, keeping their screen turned on, staying focused on the speaker, etc. are all online learning behaviors that students don’t have much practice with.

I am a big proponent of teaching routines well, and then giving students a visual cue to remember how to do it later. This is no different for online learning! Remind students of your behavior expectations with digital posters and to do lists, and they will be more successful! 

Interactive Slides

I think we all would agree when we say that learning online is not ideal. This is especially true for primary learners. Their attention spans aren’t strong enough for a seven hour workday. And things that they are able to do sitting in a classroom, such as worksheets, or harder to engage them with when they are online in their own homes.

I recommend mixing in interactive activities when you are teaching as often as possible. When you are teaching whole group have Waze for students to interact with you rather than just listening to you teach. When students are doing independent activities, use activities that encourage them to interact with the slides.

Keep Lessons Brief

In the same way that using interactive activities will help students stay engaged, keeping your lessons brief will also keep your students from mentally checking out.

In the classroom, we are always fighting to hold our students’ attention, but it’s a little bit easier when you can do things like jump around and change the volume of your voice. When you are online you’re limited to a screen, and students are surrounded by distractions in their homes. 

I recommend boiling each lesson down to one main objective and working quickly to teach that objective to your students. After you’ve taught the objective and practiced a little, it’s time for a brain break and to move on to some sort of independent practice.

Variety of Whole group, Small group, and Independent work

Digital learning is not going to take the same structure as in person learning. If you are used to 30 minutes of whole group teaching time followed by an hour of small group teaching time, it may look different online. But the thing that stays the same as that students still need a variety of learning opportunities.

Your students still need time to listen to you teach on a topic on your own. They still need time to work in small groups. They still need time to practice skills independently. All of these things are possible to do online! You can use breakout rooms on zoom to pull students in small reading or math groups and reinforce skills. And you can do daily math warm-ups or phonics warm-ups whole group before you dig into the meat of your reading lesson.

Using these tips, I hope that you find more success than ever with teaching your students online. If you want to find all of my lessons and teaching materials in one, money saving bundle, click here! This bundle will help you implement these tips with ease, and will save you plenty of stress and planning time!

Happy (online) teaching, everyone!

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