Distance Learning: April Showers

Hi!
      I hope this post finds you and your family well.  I thought that I would take a moment to share what we've been doing during the Stay-at-Home orders.  As you know, we are all getting settled into Distance Learning.  I have been holding my Circle Times over Zoom and posting follow-up activities to Google Classroom.  Here's what we did this week:


      Our stories for this week are Little Cloud by Eric Carle and It Looked Like Spilt Milk by Charles G. Shaw.  I am still following my picture schedule.  It may have changed a little since I last blogged.
     Morning Message used to be practicing writing the student's name because I worked with them in community 1-on-1.  Now I try to see my entire caseload in 1 Zoom session per week.  It would take forever to write everyone's name; so instead I feature a letter and model writing it and saying it's sound.  Students are asked to use their pointer finger to write the letter in the air and repeat the sound with me.  Then they are asked to say what words they know that begin with that sound.
      Each number on my schedule represents an activity that we do together.  Number 4 is a follow up to the letter which was modeled.  I just hold up objects from a bin that both begin and do not begin with the letter R.  I call on students, "What is this?"  "Does this begin with the letter R?"  "Can you hear the R sound when you say that word?"
      Number 3 is a little activity that I hooked up to follow up on the story.  I made a simple printable of shapes and cut them out on white paper like clouds.  I use a blue laminated file folder as my backdrop and arrange the shapes in random order.  I move them around to make a car, a house, and candy!  I call on students to guess what I made.  In the Google Classroom I've included  a copy of the shapes for my students.  Parents are encouraged to print them and cut them out at home so their child can make things with shapes like Little Cloud from the story.  My classroom is private; but I've included a FREE copy of the shape printable here.
      Last but certainly not least, no lesson would be complete without a little counting.  Once again I pull out my Rain Drop 10 Frames.  I love using blue floral glass beads for raindrops!  Because I did this activity over Zoom I used a clip board to hold it up to the camera and packaging tape to hold the beads in place as we counted.
      The house on my schedule represents an activity that the students do at home when the Zoom Circle Time is done.  For this I upload a variety of different leveled materials to the Google Classroom for parents to access and use at home.   I include link to a YouTube video of 'It Looked Like Spilt Milk' by Charles G. Shaw (read by another teacher); my April Showers At Home Learning Packet; a few pages from my Letter of the Week R packet; and the shape page that I mentioned earlier.

      I record each session with parent's permission and make it available in the Google Classroom (which is private).  This allows the students who missed it to see it; it allows the students who participated to see themselves in the video; and it allows me to review and collect data for their portfolios. 

      Well that's it!  I hope that you enjoyed this blog post and found it to be useful!

      Thanks for taking the time to read my post and thanks for stopping by!

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