3 Tips for Remote Learning Series: Making Remote Learning Fun For Your Elementary School Students
Why do we need to make learning fun?
Many of our students are in a whole new learning situation! Many of them have never had to learn solely from home in a digital environment. Many of them may not even have a parent at home to assist them in their learning. Many of them may be sharing a computer between 3 children. Many of them may not have internet service.
So instead of trying to make this like a traditional classroom… which it is not, let’s find fun ways for our students to drive their learning.
Here are 3 tips for making remote learning fun!
- Offer students a fun way to learn with materials that are easily accessible at home! Let’s offer both tangible and digital options for our students! It’s not healthy to stare at a computer screen all day so we need to think of ways that we can integrate tangible learning opportunities for students.
- Remember that online learning takes longer than traditional classroom learning. Instead of driving class with traditional assignments, have fun and allow your students to drive their learning. Let them choose how they will learn and how they will demonstrate their learning. Then, you can sit back and enjoy their creativity and ingenuity.
- Stay connected through social media or an LMS. Your students want to see and connect with you and their peers! Stay connected online and connect their learning to a central location so that conversations, videos, and fun can be had by all!
Check out these ideas for remote learning that are fun, student driven, and will keep us connected!
Choice Boards
Create a few fun choice boards with a mix of both digital and physical fun activities! Be sure to connect it to your social media so that you can continue to build community! So for example, have the students complete a task and then post about their experience on your class Facebook or Instagram page.
Here is an example of a Wakelet Choice Board
Check out Kasey Bell’s podcast and free ebook on choice boards.
Masked Singer
My friend Bernie Duke from Van ISD had this awesome idea for a teacher PD day! I love the idea of using it with students! Let’s have a Flipgrid competition of Masked Singer. So when thinking of ways that I would make remote learning fun, I thought it would be great to add to this idea and have students review their favorite Flocabulary song with a game of Masked Singer.
Here’s how:
- Students use Flipgrid to record themselves singing a Flocabulary song or a creation of their own from various content with an emoji of their choice covering their face. Remember that Flipgrid now allows you to record the music from your phone while simultaneously recording a video.
- Students then listen to their friend’s videos and try to guess who the “masked” singer is on each video.
Bingo
What about playing Bingo! Create a Bingo card of your own for your students to complete of use this site to create one for you! Don’t forget to have your students shout Bingo when they are finished either on your class Facebook page or on Flipgrid!
This was a great idea shared by our friend, Karyn Fillhart! Check out her deck of non-digital ideas for remote learning!
💥 UPDATED post info from Karyn 👇
“I made a short link for it and added more earlier today. http://Bit.ly/NoTechLearning and finished a blog post with free internet and data links from various providers: https://gktechies.wordpress.com/“
STEM
Below is a great list of STEM activities that are tangible, easy to do at home and fun!
💥 UPDATED list from Chris Woods below 👇
Maker Stations
More fun STEM ideas! We recently discovered this amazing resource from Brooke Brown on Instagram (@teachoutsidethebox)! She provides 3 weeks of maker challenges for students. Here is the PDF with instruction cards, supply lists, QR code resources, and student planning and reflection sheets. She provides hours of creation and fun ideas for you to offer your students during #remotelearning. Be sure to check out her blog as well for more great ideas.
Guess Who
Play a game of Guess Who with Flipgrid! Great idea shared by Matt Miller! Check out his great blog post “50 elearning activitites, templates, and tutorials”.
Novel Effect
Have fun reading with Novel Effect! Encourage your students to grab a book from their home library, download the Novel Effect app and begin reading. Your students will love the sound effects and mood that is created form reading with this engaging app.
Genially
We also love the gaming aspect that Genially has to offer! Create digital games and breakouts for your students! This is just a sampling of the amazing game options available. Definitely check out their site at https://www.genial.ly/!
After playing an online game, challenge your students to play a board game. Have them share the winner on your social media or in your LMS.
Nearpod: Time to Climb
Nearpod has a great review game called “Time to Climb”. It asks questions and student progress up the hill as they answer questions quickly and correctly! Students love this game and it is free with Nearpod.
Find out more by checking out this Nearpod blog post.
There are so many great options out there for creating a fun, remote learning environment! We hope we have shared a few that will help you create and foster a fun remote learning environment!
Want to learn more? Check out the #Jenallee blog series “3 Tips for Remote Learning”
1 Comment
Mary Campomizzi · May 5, 2020 at 7:59 am
OMG Nearpod! Never heard of it, but it was exactly what I was looking for! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!