Back to school is always stressful. Add on the possibility of starting the year with distance learning, and you’ve now reached a whole new level of stress and uncertainty. There’s not much we can control during these times, but we do know one thing: whether we are teaching in person or virtually, we will start the year building our classroom community. Here are some distance learning ideas for back to school to help build your classroom community.
Have a morning meeting each day
Just like in the classroom, starting the day in a predictable way with a morning meeting is a great way to build and foster a classroom community. You can record it ahead of time if you are just focusing on the morning message and send the links to families, or you can hold it live each morning on Google Meet or Zoom. If you hold a live morning meeting, you can go through all the parts (greeting, share, activity, and message), or pick and choose the parts that work best for you.
Do Read Alouds
Doing a read aloud is a simple way to get students to share about themselves and start to learn about one another. They’re also a great way to start talking about important topics like diversity and acceptance. You can read your favorite back to school books, books about names, books that celebrate similarities and differences between one another, and books about different types of families… there are even books out now about being an online learner!
Small Class Meetings
You can meet live with small groups on Google Meet or Zoom, and do some community building activities together. Here is a list of some of my favorites:
- Stand up if/sit down if: All students start sitting down. You make a statement like, “Stand up if you play soccer.” Any students who play soccer stand up, and those who don’t stay seated. Then, everyone sits down before you say the next statement.
- Voting: Make a chart and ask questions like, “Do you like ice cream?” Use tally marks, student names, or student pictures to collect results. Then, you can share the results with the whole class at the next day’s morning meeting. This is a great way to sneak some math into your morning meeting as well!
- Would you rather?: Ask students questions like, “Would you rather go to the beach or the zoo?” and give students a chance to unmute themselves to share.
- Everybody has a name poem: Each day, choose one student to highlight during your morning meeting. Sing the poem (students will eventually learn the poem and sing it with you), and then do the name activities.
- Sing favorite songs/poems/nursery rhymes together: Share your screen with students in a small group or whole group meeting, and enjoy your favorite songs or nursery rhymes. You can even throw in a Go Noodle to enjoy together! Even if you’re not meeting live, you can record a video of yourself singing the song or reading the poem and send the link to students. They can still sing along with you and watch the video over and over!
- Class family “book”: Have students email you (or send via Seesaw) a picture of their family. Compile the pictures into a virtual book using Google Slides, and share the link with families.
Don’t forget to incorporate these distance learning ideas once you start teaching curriculum as well. It’s important to keep nurturing your classroom community every day!
Do you have other distance learning ideas for back to school? Leave a comment below and share them with us!
Looking for more distance learning tips? Click here to read my best distance learning tips for kindergarten.
