Back to School Activity Ideas for Remote Learning

The beginning of the school year is always a stressful time for teachers. We are getting our classrooms ready and preparing to meet a whole new group of students. The stress dreams begin to surface about a week before school starts. You show up to work an hour late, your key won’t open your classroom door, your car brakes don’t work…you know…the usual. However, this year there is even more stress and uncertainty surrounding our school year. Our district, like all surrounding districts in the Bay Area, has decided to start the year remotely, which brings about a ton of its own challenges.

One challenge that has kept us up at night is how to build a strong classroom community while teaching remotely. We start building our student relationships and classroom communities on day one. This year will be no different, even if we are connecting through a computer screen. 

We have resigned ourselves to the fact that our lessons that we would like to teach may take a bit longer when taught remotely, and we have also decided that our main focus will be to spend more time getting to know more about our students each and every day.  We have created a ton of highly engaging get to know you activities. We will be using one activity per day for the first week of school. We also love starting each class period by taking roll with a question. We usually do this for the first quarter; however, this year we will be asking a question to take roll for at least the first semester. If you want a list of the types of questions we ask our students, you can check out our blog post on Daily Check-in Ideas for Remote Learning. The students L-O-V-E getting to know one another through the questions that we ask, and we learn a ton over the course of the quarter about our students and their lives. 

At the start of each year, we also usually have our students complete one artistic activity that we use to get to know our students better. We hang that same artwork on our walls. It is a really great way to build class community, and it helps students to feel that they are a part of our classrooms. They feel safer, more connected, and relaxed in a space that is representative of who they are. This year, because we are teaching from a distance, we are going to try a few different activities. One activity that we are going to try is The Best Part of Me image and writing activity. We have made some cute templates that you can download for free. 

Another activity that we are going to complete during the first week of school is our virtual locker activity. We are excited to learn more about our students and see what types of images they will choose to decorate their lockers. The last activity that we will be having our students complete within the first few weeks of school is our Sensory Inventory activity. The sensory inventory activity  gives students a chance to think more deeply about themselves, and it is a nice way to make learning fun during the first few weeks back at school.

Aside from the get to know you style activities we will be sprinkling in daily to provide much needed brain breaks for our students, we will also be trying out some directed drawing activities. We will be using the chrome extension Pear Deck for most of our remote teaching presentations. One of the great things about Pear Deck is that is allows students to draw right on the screen. The directed drawing activity has the students follow a set of drawing directions. We give our students about two minutes to complete this particular drawing, then reveal each of the personality traits associated with different aspects of the picture drawn. For this test, there are six different factors that determine personality. The kids love them, and they are a lot of fun.

Last, we will be having some fun throughout the first few weeks playing games like This or That. We will be using Pear Deck again to have our students drag a dot to the side they agree with most for some of the This or That activities, and for others, we will be using the web programs MURAL and Jam Board.

While the beginning of the year is always stressful, we hope that some of these activities will help to lessen that stress just a little bit for you all. We know there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to remote learning, but we also know that if we spend a good amount of time getting to know our students and learning about who they are right from the beginning, we will have a better chance of keeping our students engaged, connected, and happy when they are in our classrooms.

Until next time teacher friends!

Bottoms up!