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Ideas for e-learning during the Coronavirus school closures
This blog post is designed to offer ideas and support to any person who may be struggling with the current changes to education brought on by the spread of COVID-19. The school I work at in Beijing has remained closed since the end of January. Therefore, I have adapted the way I teach and helped to create a digital learning programme. While the tips and resources in this post might not be useful for all students, I hope that this post could offer help to teachers who are new to e-learning, or assist parents who are now the main educators for their children in many situations. The ideas and resources shown within this post have been used for a Year 6 mixed ability group, but could be adapted for different age levels or abilities. I will update this page with new ideas as time passes, so feel free to check back in the future. If you are wanting more information about how to set up an e-learning programme, please check out my post here.
General structure of digital learning lessons
Our school has been providing live lessons on Zoom in which our students can attend half hour sessions. Our lessons generally comprise of a mixture of teacher-talk, discussions with the students (sharing responses/ideas in the chat box or speaking on microphone) and multimedia (such as videos, images or audio files). We have found that having a short break with an educational video takes the “lecture” feeling away from our sessions. Our school has a subscription to Brainpop (they do also offer some free resources without subscription), Twinkl, and Britannica for Kids. YouTube (despite being banned in China) also provides some useful short videos which supplement our lesson content.
The lessons usually have the following structure:
Welcome – check in with the students to see how they are feeling and discuss the Learning Objective of the session.
WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like) – review the previous session/talk about examples of work that were good.
Warm-up: A task to focus the students on the subject area or content.
Learning: The main focus of the lesson, usually including a video or other multimedia file, questions for the students to answer and a discussion time.
Independent task: this is introduced towards the end of the session and is based on the content of the lesson. These tasks are talked through and shared with the students as a pdf. We include examples of what we would expect for each task and add extra ‘challenges’ for those students that want to be extended.
Below I have provided some ideas, examples and suggestions of activities, lessons or project work for English, Math, Science, Geography and History, Music and P.E.
Below I have provided some ideas, examples and suggestions of activities, lessons or project work for English, Math, Science, Geography and History, Music and P.E.
English
Short Story Writing Unit (approximately 3 weeks)
As a Year Six team, we felt that our students could benefit from revisiting a story writing unit. Students already have experience of narratives, so we believed that covering content that is familiar could be comforting to the students during a strange time. We of course changed the parameters, focus and expectations of what the students should be including in their writing so that they would be building on their existing knowledge and understanding. This unit can be adapted for younger or older students and more/less time could be given depending on the ability and age of the students.
During our English lesson warm-ups, we generally give students a discussion task or an activity to make them think and focus on English (generally a SPaG activity). The following website offers a large number of editing tasks (students must identify and change errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar) which we spend around 3 minutes on: https://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/archives/edit.shtml
Week 1
During the first week of our story writing unit, we spent time discussing the purpose of storytelling and how it has changed over the years (from cave paintings, to sharing stories verbally, plays, radio shows, movies and television programmes and now to the internet and video sharing sites such as YouTube). We explored examples of different genres of narratives and spent time talking about favourite stories. Next, we looked at examples of short stories that many of the students were familiar with. We covered a range of skills such as retelling/summarising a story, identifying the various parts of the plot and placing them on a story mountain and brainstorming alternative dilemmas/resolutions to stories.
Here are useful videos to remind students on how to summarise stories and the main elements of a story:
Summarising a story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsB73dRuGcE
Story mountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpWHZJZQDSE
The YouTube channel ‘Cool School’ has some short funny videos that are appealing to primary school students (even though the content is mostly fairy tales, the humour and animations were engaging for our Year 6 students) and were useful to show quick examples of how stories are structured.
The Princess and the pea
Mulan
The Three Billy Goats Gruff:
We later spent time as a class creating a rubric/checklist of what we thought were important features in a short story.
Week 2
In the second week, we wanted students to begin brainstorming and planning for their own story. There are many examples online of story mountain templates that you can use for your students.
The following videos were useful materials.
What is an imaginative narrative:
Brainstorming:
Planning:
Writing a beginning:
Writing a middle:
Writing an ending:
We have also included sessions on how to edit and revise the work we have done. Rather than leaving all of the editing until the end, we placed some editing sessions during the story writing process.
How to edit/revise texts:
Examples of story writing/writing process:
A humorous video which outlines the elements of a story plot:
A series of videos that outline parts of the story mountain and include emphasis on descriptions of characters and setting:
Week 3
In the final week of our unit, students continued to write their stories and spent time during the lessons sharing their work. I have been giving the students the option of what or how much they share:
§ Reading part of what they have written.
§ Discussing an edit or ‘up-leveling’ change they have made to their work.
§ Explaining what they plan to write ext.
Once the students have finished the writing, they will self-assess using the rubric we created. Next, students will share their work with peers. We will spend time discussing how to give helpful and useful feedback before asking students to read other stories and share their advice and thoughts. Posting the finished stories to a platform such as Microsoft Teams or Seesaw will be a celebration of the story writing and will help to maintain the sense of community and pride in their work.
Reading Challenges (ongoing)
We want students to feel encouraged to continue reading during this time. While websites such as Raz Kids and Read Theory provide a good platform where students can be assigned leveled books which match their ability, we are also aware that we want students to have time away from devices. So, we have encouraged students to consider using physical books for reading challenges (this has not always been possible due to the location and restrictions of some students).
The idea of the reading challenge is for students to feel enthusiastic and engage in what they have read.
The students can be reading various books during this time; however, we want them to select one book which they have enjoyed. Then, the students will have the choice of an activity (or a number of activities) which can show their understanding and comprehension of the content and allows them to express their ideas or creativity.
Below is a list of post-reading activities we have suggested to our students.
Mathematics
Show what you know (a stand-alone activity which could be repeated for various content)
A good open-ended activity in which students can work at their own level, is to assign students a ‘knowledge harvest’ activity. This is when you select a mathematical topic (for example, fractions) and ask students to show all of the facts they know about this topic on a poster. This activity is good for students as it makes them think critically about what they already know and can challenge the students to think about all of the facts they know about that topic.
Below is an example:
This knowledge harvest idea can be used in other subject areas. You can scaffold the activity by including sentence/fact starters (like the example above: how to find fractions of an amount...) or you can keep it completely open-ended and just give them a topic in which they will need to show what they know.
Shape books (project work 1-2 weeks)
Another activity that students could complete is a project where students will create a resource on geometry (shapes, lines and angles). Our students have done this before during school time, but it could also be done as a home-schooling activity. Our students were given the task to create a bilingual (English and Chinese) educational resource which would teach other primary school students about 2D and 3D shapes, different types of line and angles. Students could choose to make a physical book, comic, video or other digital resource. The books and resources that we created were then shared and sent to schools in other locations within China. Having a purpose and an audience for this project really motivated our students and if this was completed during time away from school, their work could still be shared online or printed once normal routine is resumed.
Science
Our students continue to be in many different locations. Some were on holiday when the issues surrounding the virus became more serious and therefore some children did not have access to many materials or resources. There are still however, some activities that you could try to assign your students. Here is a suggestion:
States of matter
We asked our students to create a resource (PowerPoint, poster, video etc.) which would show their understanding of the states of matter. We also asked our students to include demonstrations of reversible and irreversible changes.
The students were quite excited at having the opportunity to do practical activities.
Some of the demonstrations our students included frying an egg (irreversible change) or mixing vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. As part of the demonstration, the students had to be explaining the science behind what was happening using the correct vocabulary. We shared the following links with students so that they could get some ideas if they were struggling:
History/geography
Global citizens/people who changed the world
Project work has been quite successful for us, as students are able to dip in and out of the work at times which are convenient for them, there is an element of choice for the students and it is differentiated by outcome.
A project which we have completed is looking at people who have made a positive difference to the world/global citizens.
First, we discussed what we thought a global citizen was. Next, we looked at some videos showing examples of people who have made a positive impact.
Malala Yousafzai:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48pFoAObv_w
Michelle Obama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F88YYnw6lsE
Mohandas Gandhi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWhCniD9VkI
Greta Thunberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzLuAHLR53A
Greta Thunberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzLuAHLR53A
After watching the videos, we discussed what skills and attributes those people had displayed.
Finally, we gave the students the choice to choose one of the people we had learned about or selecting a different person to research in more detail. The students were given a planning sheet to do research, before using that information to create a fact-file or biography on that person. A geography link to this could be for students to focus on people who made a positive impact to a particular place or location. What was that place like before and how has it changed? Students could delve into the culture and geographical features of that place and later share their findings.
Physical education
It is important for our students to remain active. Some students may be able to go outside and maintain a relatively normal routine. Others have access to parks or gardens. When my school first closed, some of my students were unable to leave their apartments for a number of weeks. Therefore, we tried to offer our students some ways to keep active. The P.E teacher at our school has been posting videos each week with some exercise routines for student to follow and try at home.
If this is not possible, there are a number of exercise/fun activity videos available on YouTube or other websites which students can use. Searching for ‘just dance’ videos provides many different options for students to copy the dance moves to some of their favourite songs.
Students could also create their own obstacle course or design their own active game. For example, you could inflate a plastic bag and try to keep it from falling on the floor by hitting the bag or doing kick-ups. Students can then share their obstacle course ideas or games on platforms such as Seesaw or Teams for their peers to try.
Music
Some students may be lucky to have musical instruments to play with. Others may have access to different genres of music. Ask the students to listen to various genres and share their opinions of each style, with a comment on the rhythm, tone, melody and any instruments they can identify.
Another activity for students to complete is a game which I think could be described as an audio version of charades.
First ask students to brainstorm the sounds they might hear around their home during the morning/afternoon/evening. Some examples they might say are snoring, brushing teeth, buttering toast, closing doors, walking up/down stairs etc.
Using household objects, their voice or body parts (clapping hands, stomping feet etc.) students will need to reenact a sound(s) that they might hear as part of a daily routine.
Can others guess what sound they are trying to represent? This game could be played as a family, or students could record their different sounds and share them on platforms like Teams for their classmates to guess.
Allowing time for interaction and collaboration for some tasks creates a sense of community which is lacking for some students as we adhere to social distancing/isolation/quarantine.
I hope that you have found something useful in this blog post. If you have any other suggestions or resources, please get in touch and we can try to create a bank of e-learning ideas. Take care everyone!
I hope that you have found something useful in this blog post. If you have any other suggestions or resources, please get in touch and we can try to create a bank of e-learning ideas. Take care everyone!
