virtual learning

Kitchen Kindergarten – Math & Literacy Distance Learning

Digital is not an enemy – it’s a new possibility.”

Carla Rinaldi, President of Reggio

I try to spend most of my life living in a space of thinking about what’s possible. And sometimes that’s hard. Really hard. Lately, it’s been an ongoing challenge. I never thought I would be considering ways to teach four and five year olds remotely. And yet, here we are. When Carla Rinaldi suggested that digital is a “new possibility”, it opened my eyes to viewing distance learning in a new light. As I reflect back on four months of distance learning with kindergarteners, I realize that we had several successful routines and learning adventures, as I’m sure you all had, as well. It’s important for me to share them and to invite you to share yours, as this is the way we can grow and learn together – making our journey into distance learning the best it can be. And remembering that this is temporary.

Our job is too difficult and too beautiful to do alone.”

Amelia Gambetti, Reggio Emilia, April 2015 (quote from Diane Kashin’s blog)

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you’ve heard me write about my firm belief that we teach children first and foremost – not standards, curriculum or programs. I think we really need to remember that as we move to virtual teaching in the foreseeable future. At a wonderful webinar by Mike Flynn, he said, “good online teaching is good teaching – don’t let the ed-tech get in the way.” We need to focus on our students first, then what good in-person teaching would look like and then choose a tech tool that matches. We can’t focus first on the fancy technology that might be flashy and look cool, but may not be what our students need.

I used Google Meet because it was one of the approved platforms in my district. You can do these things on Zoom or Microsoft Teams and I’m sure other platforms that I’m not familiar with. Blackboard Collaborate Ultra will present more challenges, because of the inability to see more than 5 people at a time on the screen, but it’s still possible to adapt for your online platform if that’s what you have to use. I’d like to continue this blog series with a look into a few things that worked for us in math and literacy learning in whole group. You can find my previous post here.

Math

I continued the number talks and math routines that we were used to doing in the classroom and adapted them for a virtual setting. Here are a few of the ones that worked well, with links to explain them further.

  • Finger patterns were a favorite, and we used them in a variety of ways. This required being able to see everyone on the screen, something that I felt was essential for many reasons – finger patterns being one of them. I had a magnetic 10 frame and number cards from the fabulous Tiny Polka Dot math game that I would show the kids. The kids would then use their fingers to show me the number in multiple ways. This might sound like, “How many? Show me on your fingers. I see 3 and 4. Can you show me 7 a different way? I see 2 and 5.”
  • Which One Doesn’t Belong? – We used Christopher Danielson’s book in the classroom along with this website and created many of these images on our own in Google Slides. This was an easy math routine to adapt to virtual by sharing the screen and recording children’s thinking in the Jamboard or Google Document.
  • How Many? – This is another excellent math book by Christopher Danielson, but the book is just a starting point. Once you start thinking “how many?” when looking at objects, you start taking pictures of all sorts of things! When you water your garden, when you’re organizing painting supplies, when your running shoes overflow the closet (OK, maybe that’s just me) – all are opportunities for a math talk that begins with the question, “how many?” I love these talks because there are so many possibilities and it gives kids a chance to count, explain their thinking and think beyond rote counting. Choosing highly engaging photos hooks kids right away and makes for an exciting math talk.
  • Three Act Tasks – I had a lot of success using these in virtual learning. This website will explain what a 3-Act Task is. These are highly engaging and really challenge kids to think and explain their thinking.
  • Is it Fair? and Who Is Hiding?– Antonia Cameron, Patricia Gallahue and Danielle Iacoviello’s wonderful new book Early Childhood Math Routines explains these routines in depth. This blog post shows you how an Is it Fair? routine might go. Using photos that kids are familiar with and their names makes this engaging and a rich mathematical conversation, where kids have to decide and justify if an image is fair or not. Who Is Hiding? is another quick image routine that supports oral language and helps them make meaning through conversation as new information is presented. These open-ended math routines encourage rich conversation and debate and work well in a virtual platform.
Who Is Hiding? is a quick image routine that encourages close looking, wondering and meaningful conversation. Choose a photo that connects with your kids and content and create a Google Slides document where you can slowly reveal the picture – removing pieces with each slide.

Literacy

Literacy continued to be woven throughout our virtual classes, just as it was in the classroom. Here are a few things we did routinely in virtual learning.

  • Read aloud – I made sure to read aloud at least one book for every session we had. I shared in my earlier post how I shared the screen and used a digital text for read alouds. This let everyone see the words and pictures clearly. I also created a private YouTube channel where I read aloud books for kids to listen to on their own. Children need to hear us reading aloud and engage in conversations about books on a virtual platform as much as in a classroom.
  • Shared Reading – I used a variety of texts for shared reading. I brought several big books and charts home, but I found that children couldn’t see them as well on the screen. I would like to play around more with document cameras and a way to continue using our beloved big books. Poems, chants and big books in Google Slides, Jamboard and SMART Notebook worked well. I took a photo of our class anchor chart listing what readers do, and I placed that photo next to the shared reading text – just like we would have it hanging near our shared reading text in the classroom. I used my cursor as the pointer. I also learned that you can make your cursor larger in your computer’s Accessibility setting (Display – Cursor Size) – and that’s a game changer! Our poetry and song notebooks are such a huge part of our classroom reading life, and I want to continue this practice during distance learning by mailing home copies of the shared reading texts for children to put in their notebooks. Finding a way to distribute these is something that teachers need to think about. It’s important for kids to have hard copies of reading materials – not just digital. We need to figure out a way to routinely get these things into the hands of kids.
  • Shared Writing – I did shared writing on a large piece of paper as well as on a Jamboard or Google Document. If kids can have a white board or paper to write along with you, that’s even better and far more engaging. We continued to co-construct texts such as letters, class books and community stories – just like we did in the classroom. I found that if I was typing the children’s words, I had to slow down considerably. Inviting them to write along with me and share what they wrote in front of the camera helped me with that. Just as in the classroom, our shared writing pieces became shared reading pieces to revisit again and again.
  • Word Work – A magnetic burner cover or a cookie sheet makes a great portable way to do word work virtually. I brought home my magnetic letters and used these often, just as I would in the classroom. With their white boards or paper they could do the word work along with me. I would love for my kids to each have a set of magnet letters – that’s something I’m thinking about for the fall. I recently learned about these letter tiles, and look forward to trying them out.

I want to be back in our classroom more than anything in the world right now. I want to experience the togetherness and pure joy that a classroom full of children brings. I want to hug children, paint with children, hear the joyous roar of children at play and share a book with tiny, squiggling humans on our rug. It physically hurts to know that won’t happen anytime soon. However, we can make distance learning the best it can be right now, at the same time we long to be back in our classrooms full of hugs, love, joy and children’s laughter. Maybe we can even create virtual classrooms that have all of that in a way that’s never happened before – it’s certainly a possibility. Loris Malaguzzi said, “nothing without joy”. How can we create virtual learning spaces that are full of joy?

What has worked well for you? Please share. We are all on this journey together.

Dancing and singing the monarch migration. I miss this.

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Kitchen Kindergarten – Distance Learning with Young Children

I haven’t met any early childhood teacher who loves teaching virtually. Perhaps there are some out there, but overwhelmingly teachers want to be in classrooms – playing, hugging, learning and wondering with their students. We were plunged into distance crisis teaching last March, and we will be continuing this type of teaching for some time, I’m afraid. Embracing virtual or distance learning and looking for ways to make it work, and work well, is important, while acknowledging that this is temporary.

Carla Rinaldi, the President of Reggio said, “a digital experience is among the 100 languages – 100 possibilities – 100 ways of approaching reality – of the children. Digital is not an enemy – it’s a new possibility.”

How can we make distance learning the best it can possibly be – a new possibility for our children?

I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on what worked and what didn’t work in virtual or distance learning for my kindergartners. I’m continuing to learn, think, explore and collaborate as I do Kitchen Kindergarten Summer Version – my district’s “continuity of learning” sessions. I will share a few things that I found are working quite well for whole group learning. I will tell you, I’m pretty “low-tech”. I start with what I know works well in the classroom and think about how I can adapt it to virtual teaching. I’m learning a lot more “high-tech” options this summer, but most of these ideas are in the “low-tech” category. I’m planning future posts on whole group, small group, 1:1 and play dates, as well as thoughts for how it might look starting with a new class of kindergartners.

Kitchen Kindergarten – two laptops were KEY – I could see what the kids were seeing when I was sharing my screen.

A few ideas for whole group distance/virtual learning:

Langston’s drawing after a whole group song where kids created a character in each verse.
  • Have a predictable starting and ending routine. We start each Google Meet with a hello drum song, greeting each child by name. We end each Meet with a favorite class song, “Skinnamarinkydink” and then send each other hearts with our hands as we say good-bye to each child on the Meet. Singing virtually is messy, but fun – and so worth the joy of coming together with a song.
  • Plan activities that actively engage the children, rather than have them passively sitting in front of the screen. My kids all have white boards and this is a great way to have them be actively learning. They can write words, numbers, draw, etc.. I found this worked better than the chat box for kindergarten. We practiced letter formation, sight words, number formation, math stories, drawing, names, and played games with our white boards. Have the kids get up to dance, move, find things to share, etc. – just like in the classroom. We wouldn’t have kids sitting passively for 30 minutes in a classroom – it’s important to have lots of opportunities for active learning and movement while on a screen, too.
  • Give children time to talk and engage with each other. We have time each Meet to share stories and show our pets, apartments, toys, backyards and family members. I share my dog, my garden and tell stories of my life at home. Kids share books they made, art they created, and the stories of their lives that we love to hear. Our time virtually is much less than a school day, but we still need to make time to share all those stories that would normally be shared during our school day. It’s how we stay connected and feel like a community. I start each Meet with share time and invite kids to stay on after our scheduled class time ends if they have more stories to share. We often go well beyond the scheduled 30 minutes, but it’s important to hear what they have to say.
  • Hidden Pictures are a huge hit and a wonderful way to work on vocabulary, oral language and directional words and they are highly engaging. Highlights for Kids (remember the magazines in the doctor’s office when you were a kid?!) has them for free on their website. My kids LOVE them.
  • Puppets! I worked with a teaching artist from Wolf Trap Performing Arts Center this past year and learned so much about puppetry, so it was natural to continue this into our virtual classroom. The children engaged so well with puppets and it is definitely a strategy I will continue to use. Stuffed animals of our favorite book characters, well-known class puppets and some new friends helped me teach new concepts like why we need to wear a mask, and also helped us with navigating big feelings we had, social-emotional learning, retelling stories and engaging with number talks and math stories.
  • Read lots and lots of books and talk about them – just like we do in the classroom! I brought home a ton of books, but I found it was frustrating for the kids to watch me reading a book. They had trouble seeing the pictures, and if their Meets setting wasn’t right, if anyone else talked, their image would replace me. I made the switch over to reading books on a shared screen with a variety of tools. Open Library K-12 Student Library is where I look for titles of books I want to read first – they have so many books available for free. I also use Kindle for their many free digital books, and I’ve purchased some of my all-time favorites. I’m exploring Loom and using a document camera, too.
  • Continue focusing on inquiry and play. Mystery Doug and SciShow Kids are two of my favorite YouTube video sites for exploring questions that kids ask. They are short (3-5 minute) videos that focus on a question and encourage kids to talk and wonder. I found them to be great introductions to a topic. I will show the video and then stop and have a conversation with kids. Then we will do some type of active learning and invitation for kids to try something at home. We explored how airplanes fly and then made our own paper airplanes. We measured how far they could fly with our shoes/steps and then read a book about how to make paper airplanes to give them more ideas. Finally, the kids revised their airplane to see if they could make it fly even further. One day we learned about trees and wondered “what is the biggest tree?” – Mystery Doug pointed out that “biggest” could mean lots of different things and showed us several really cool BIG trees. Then I cut an avocado and showed the kids how they could grow their own avocado tree with an avocado pit, a jar and toothpicks. I leave links and invitations on our Google Classroom after each session for kids to revisit what we did and extend the learning if they choose. It’s also nice for children who didn’t attend the Meet to see what they missed and engage in the learning on their own.
  • Teach the kids how to mute and unmute because of background noise, but don’t control their voices. My friend Christy Thompson wrote a wonderful blog post about this here. Being able to use a tool like Zoom or Meets, where you can see all the kids is SO important. It’s easier for them to slide their voices into a conversation or raise their hands and it’s more like being in the classroom. It’s also so important to be able to see each other, show each other things and feel that sense of community that we all need. They want to see their friends. We have to let the kids see each other, talk and continue creating community in virtual learning.

These are just a few things that I’ve found work well. I’ll continue to share my thinking here. I truly believe that the teachers who have experienced virtual teaching and learning with children are the experts. We need to share our ideas and experiences with each other so that we can be in the best position possible to continue distance learning or resume when necessary this fall. What ideas do you have for whole group virtual learning? Please share!

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