Today was our first day of virtual teaching in kindergarten. I was nervous, stressed, and excited. It felt good to be in my first day of school outfit, to have lesson plans, and to be in the classroom. As promised, we’re sharing what worked, what didn’t and some lessons we learned. And yes, there’s a video of our day!
Lessons I Learned On Day 1
- Practice with your setup. I learned during our live teaching today that my set up was awkward so I rearranged and simplified.
- When doing activities that you want to model, have examples at various steps so the kids don’t have to necessarily watch you do the entire thing. That doesn’t work well in the virtual setting.
- Using visuals for muting and unmuting worked GREAT!
- The wireless doorbell worked GREAT! I used it to help them focus back on the screen!
- Teaching from the classroom is a game-changer. It felt official. The kids loved it.
- I had 6 (out of 11) show up. Two tried but had tech issues. We spent the afternoon addressing tech issues so I expect more to show up tomorrow! (More kids will register this week and next!)
- I recorded the entire live block and posted it to YouTube and shared the link to all the families so everyone has access to the same teaching!
We are using Teams for live teaching and Schoology for our learning management software. We teach live for 2 hours (we will build up to that). I’m sending paper packets home so the kids can do activities at home. I modeled the activities and we talked about them. They completed them and sent me pictures. Here are some samples of their work:
And to cap off our day….I got this message from a parent:
Here’s the video of our day:
For more on our day, check out this blog post:
We used these resources in our lesson:
