Adapting our lessons to work online has been a challenge and I've got a bit of thinking to do over the weekend.
Every year the kid's in the preschool class have quite a wide range of levels of development and vastly different learning styles. Circle times are especially divisive; some kids love structured conversation (being called on in turn, or putting their hands up to share their ideas) while others do best when they can play with toys and chat casually with the teachers who join them. This divide is getting wider with online teaching. Some kids are thriving, while other's needs are not yet being met.
What can we do about it?
The same principals we try to apply to our classroom teaching to address this issue are still relevant to teaching online:
-Organize different group sizes throughout the day, including some one-to-one time
-Learn through play
-Give the kids choices in what to engage with.
-Co-create our lessons with the kids.
I think we are doing well with this last one; the kids have come up with some great suggestions in their reflection times, such as doing adventure yoga and building together with blocks. That activity was also a great example of learning through play:
We will definitely do activities like that more frequently in the coming week.
Another thing I think we are doing well with is pursuing our unit of inquiry. Our digital inquiry wall (on the homepage of this blog) has tracked our progress through "Tuning In" and "Finding Out" about our likes and dislikes, and our similarities and differences. As we move in to "Sorting Out", the kids can start to put together and perform their first assessment piece; their self introductions. Some have made a good early start already:
Next week we will widen our focus a little and start talking about families, with the goal of eventually creating our own family trees (see our senpai Takuma`s example on Seesaw). The Covid-19 lock down gives us a unique opportunity with this topic; we have a lot of parents and other family members available to us, including my own family who are at home under even stricter conditions in New Zealand.
Hopefully I can arrange for them to join us at some point.
