Community Building Strategies to Support Remote Learning
Teaching remotely comes with a lot of challenges. Connecting with students and building a solid classroom community will be one of the greatest hurdles we will face. One quick way to connect with your students and learn more about them is to ask them a question each day. We usually do this during attendance during the first quarter of the school year. If you have not already checked it out, please read our post, Daily Check in Questions for Remote Learning. We provide a TON of questions you can ask your students to start off each day.
In this follow up post, we are going to share some more engaging ways to check in with your students each day, and we will share some awesome resources and strategies to help you build your class community.
Daily Check-in Questions and Strategies:
Fun Fact Friday: have students share one fun fact about them every Friday.
Type up a daily question and have your students use Answer Garden to create a word wall.
Start each day with a Would You Rather…? question and wait for hilarity to ensue.
Another idea is to use Yo Teach! or Poll Everywhere to prompt kids with a question and they type their individual answers. You can then display the answers for the class.
Check out this list of Dig Deeper Questions to learn about your students on a deeper level.
Item on my Desk: Each student gets 30 seconds to discuss and show one item on their desk or work space.
Team Building Ideas and Games:
Try practicing restorative justice in your classroom. Restorative Circle Time is a great way to build supportive classroom communities. During your circle time you could ask your students to share one rose and one thorn from the week, or one high and one low from the week. You could also call it a sweet and a sour. Whatever the name, you get the idea.
Have students share their stressors for the week. They also can also share what is helping them to cope.
Everyone loves positive affirmations. Create space and time for student shout outs.
Some ideas to celebrate individual students would be to:
Create a Padlet- put a student's name in the middle and let others comment on the Padlet all of the great things about that student.
Pick one student during class and have other students comment about that student using the chat feature.
Have the students turn on their mics and share verbally one thing that they like or respect about a fellow student.
Create a google doc for each student and have it be a place people can write their shout outs for each student in your class.
Fun Distance Learning Games:
Play Guess Who over Zoom or Google Meet.
Play Virtual Charades. You can use this simple charades generator to help come up with ideas.
Headlines: create or find hilarious headlines and group students and place them in break out rooms to create the funniest story to go with the headline. This would also be a great way to have students share their learning. You can create a fun headline based on your lesson of the day. Send kids into a breakout group to come up with a story. They can embed in their own learning from the lesson into the story. If you are required to use Google Meet, here is a great Google Meet- Break Out room Hack.
Gamify your students’ learning. Create a Kahoot! Quizizz or Jeopardy style game. These do not need to be academic. They can be true and false questions about the teacher, or a fun way to go over your course content or syllabus. They can also be a really fun way to reflect on the day’s learning.
Web Based programs to randomly choose a student name for sharing out:
Get rid of those popsicle sticks and use these cool, free websites to pick your students to share out in class or to randomly assign students to a group. You can even embed them into your class websites.