Maintaining Relationships through Distance Learning

Here are 5 simple tips that will help you maintain positive relationships with your students and parents.

1. Effort- By this time of the year, you and your students probably feel more like a family than a class and trying to maintain that same relationship without seeing one another face to face is HARD. However, it can be done! It just takes a lot of effort. Luckily, we have a little extra time these days so putting in little more effort won’t be too strenuous

2. Make it personal! Make sure to keep in touch with your students and their families as much as you can. You can do this by Zoom calls, telephone calls, Facetime, or even letters in the mail.

3. Focus More on the Relationships- Without a doubt, students learning is extremely important during this time. However, we all know that not every one of our students are being monitored and encouraged by their parent or guardian to complete all of their work. Just let it be. Take a break from learning and have fun with your students. See how they’re doing and if they need anything. Allow them to talk about whatever they want to during your class zoom meeting. Let them laugh and giggle, be silly, and hang out together.

4. Be Positive and Encouraging- We will never know the hardships our students face on a daily basis at home. School was their place to do their work without interruption. If they didn’t have a pencil, you had one to give them. If they weren’t exactly sure how to do a worksheet, you were there to give the help they need. So, if your students only complete half of their work, give them the credit they deserve! You don’t know how hard it was for them to complete that little bit of work. Be positive and encouraging. Don’t pay so much attention to the negatives.

"Our job isn’t about our classrooms, our school, our building, our districts! It’s about the students and families" – Craig Rapinchuk.

-Mallory Beach

Stay At Home Fun

Staying at home can definitely get boring, especially for children. How do we keep them occupied besides video games all day? Easy, just let them be creative. Creativeness is not just limited to pencils and crayons, but is very tangible. Building, experimenting,and evaluating are ways in which to spark creativity. Of course we want them to be constructive also, so lets try a replica challenge in which students have to creatively reconstruct something. This can be done with objects or the traditional pencil and paper.

Step 1: Find Inspiration

Children are the most creative beings because they are intrigued by almost everything. As a child I remember lining up the kitchen chairs in different patterns and then covering them with bed covers to replicate a sort of building structure. That just goes to show that inspiration can come from just about anything. Try to find something that fascinates your child.

Step 2: Gather the Materials

Like I mentioned earlier, its okay to use the o'l reliable pencil and paper, but you can also use materials unique to what you want to create. Inside the average house has so many objects that you mostly likely cant count them. Draw, build, construct. Whichever you please!

Step 3: Wow that unique!

Whatever materials you used I'm sure it turned out great. Your as creative as can be and you've probably created something that I hadn't thought of.

Here's shoe box city! Like I said, you can be creative with just about anything you can find and you'll be surprised of what you can come up with!

Family+Reading= Success

Although schools are unfortunately closed because of COVID-19, a new opportunity emerges! Parents its time more than ever to have develop reading rituals with your children. Great habits always start at home, so lets try having your child read a book to you every day. Lets look forward to a future school year free from this pandemic by preparing our children's minds.

Make A Plan:

Reading Plan.docx

Download DOCX • 13KB

This document contains the reading plan in which family can use to keep up with with their progress weekly. You can also add whatever changes you'd like if you'd want it more detailed. The ultimately purpose this hopes to accomplish is to establish consistent reading habits for students.

What Do you like to read?

As an educator we understand that finding books that capture students' interests is the goal to creating students who love reading. It would be very beneficial for parents also to find those books that students are interested in. That way children will be anxious to read more and develop healthy reading habits that they can carry on for a lifetime. Parents make sure you pay close attention to what genres intrigue your children the most.