Tag: distance learning

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Lessons Learned During Distance Learning

Last winter my daughter did a short stint of “distance learning” during her year as a kindergartener. You can read more about our experience here. 

Now that we’re a few months out from this experience, here are some interesting things I’ve learned. 

Just because one on one attention is really great for most students doesn’t mean it’s best for all students. 

This threw me off because when you have a struggling student, what’s the first line of defense usually? One-on-one learning. Pulling them aside and working with the student individually to help them understand the concept. So in my mind, I figured, my daughter will receive 1:1 attention and learning while I’m home with her, she is going to excel! It’ll give her a boost academically! And I was so wrong. Her test scores plummeted. Her reading regressed. And as soon as she was back in school? Her test scores shot up. Her reading improved greatly. Her math skills took a huge leap in what she was able to do. It wasn’t for lack of teaching, she basically had a private tutor every day for several hours at home! 

Now I know there are so many other factors to consider, this would never stand up as a true experiment for so many reasons. However, with mom and teacher intuition included, I know deep down that being back in a big classroom with the energy of her classmates and teachers around her, she truly learned better. I’m sure pulling her aside to work one on one with certain concepts would work for her in some situations! But overall, her brain wasn’t built to sit at the kitchen table with one teacher. Her brain also wasn’t built to work independently out of a workbook. Her brain is built to move and see and interact while she learns.

It gave me a new perspective on those kids in similar situations that ended up doing school from home during the year or two (ish) of covid. I knew it was hard for them, but this gave me a deeper understanding and my heart went out to them. 

Public schools do not get enough credit.

Okay, I already knew this. No one needed to tell me. But the way our principal and my daughter’s teacher stepped up and into action when I was a parent reaching out for support was absolutely incredible. Within an hour or two of sending the email to both the principal and the teacher letting them know our situation and asking for the best way to move forward, they already had a game plan made up and prepared for us. Each week they would both check in to see how we were doing and would ask if we needed any more support or help during our time at home. Public schools can get a bad rap for not caring or supporting, and I’m sure in some cases that is true. But I am extremely grateful we’ve lucked out and ended up with amazing teachers and administration. 

The bottom line is this: all children learn in their own way and teachers are amazing. It’s something we all know, but sometimes having a good reminder is really nice. 

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Is Undivided Attention Still the Best Practice in School?

We were deep in the trenches of distance learning with my daughter this winter when my 3-year-old decided to join in and learn right along with her. It was fun having him interact and adapt the lessons to his level. It was the first day we started reading Charlotte’s Web out loud together and almost immediately when he was required to sit still and listen to the book, he started bouncing off the walls. I urged him to sit down and listen, but that was met with him fidgeting with the pencils and crayons, and paper in front of him. 

To be honest, it was driving me mad! I know that everything I was feeling was straight from the social norms that I had in school and required as a teacher. However, times have changed! We’ve learned so much about the human brain and body and it’s a fact that sitting still with undivided attention is not the best way to learn for every single kid. 

The first day he fidgeted and messed with everything in front of him, it drove me crazy. I continued to tell him to stop, to sit down, and to listen. It was a fight until he finally just left the table altogether. 

The next day I was somewhat more prepared and allowed some Lego building while I read. It helped so much but didn’t completely keep him captivated and listening. 

In the days following, I adjusted my own expectations and emotions as he moved and jumped and crashed all around us as I read. It was hard for me to come to terms with him acting this way when I wanted him to listen. But the kicker was this, he was listening because I was allowing him to act this way. 

I was allowing his body to move freely and do what he needed to do best in order to listen. 

I also reflected on the times as a student when I would doodle during a lecture and I would take in more information by keeping my hands busy with a mindless activity instead of having my mind wander when I wasn’t allowed to doodle or fidget in some way. 

The way we learn is incredible and so vastly different among different personality types and students. It’s unfair to assume that just because we are not “distracted” and our eyes are looking directly at the teacher, we are taking in information and retaining what is being taught. 

It was interesting to see the difference in how much my son knew about the book based on what he was doing while I was reading. In the beginning, when I would dictate what he did during the reading time, he didn’t seem to retain much information Later on in the book when he was free to move and play as needed, he was able to tell me more about what was happening and knew who each of the characters was, even the smaller, less significant characters. 

It’s 2023- moving is listening. 

Photo by Pixabay via Pexels

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Our Distance Learning Experience

I think everyone can agree that the winter of 2022-23 was full of sickness, sickness, and more sickness. This was unfortunately all too true for our family as well, even more since we moved to a new city this year. New cities and new schools mean new germs and lots of sicknesses! 

From Labor day until Christmas, we were getting hit with one big thing after the next with no breaks in between. Our immune systems needed a break! Desperately! How many more doctors and hospital visits could we realistically take on before we needed to draw the line? 

Over Christmas break, we spent a lot of time discussing with our doctor and with each other the best steps moving forward, and ultimately what we knew was best would be pulling my oldest from kindergarten and homeschooling for a time. 

It was not a decision we took lightly. This would be a huge decision that could have an effect on her for quite a while. 

On Tuesday morning after Christmas break was over and everyone went back to school, we spent the day on the phone with her teacher, principal, and superintendent. Ultimately, the biggest question was, “Is this temporary, or for the rest of the school year?” 

With our specific situation, it needed to be temporary. She is not the type of child that would thrive in a homeschooled situation because her social needs are more than I can ever provide her while homeschooling. 

Because we chose to make this temporary, we needed to figure out the best way to move forward, whether we would unenroll her from school and then re-enroll when she came back, or how we would handle it. 

But we ended up being very fortunate that as a result of the 2020 Covid shutdowns, distance learning is still an option, but this is the last year they are allowing it in our district. So a distance learner she became! 

When schools shut down in 2020, I, fortunately, did not have a child old enough to be in school and did not have to take on the burden of distance learning. However, we’re getting the full effect now! We now have packets of papers to do with her, books to read, activities to work on, and more. 

It’s been fun to have her home each day and it’s been fun to hone in on my inner teaching skills to help her understand new concepts. I’ve loved being more involved with her learning to read and we’ve adapted a lot of the worksheets to be more hands-on and interactive, which I know is a huge privilege we have while doing work one-on-one instead of in a classroom of 25 students. 

But at the end of the day, she is one of the most extroverted humans I know (okay maybe she’s second to me), and a public school situation is somewhere she thrives, there’s no denying it. Even her teacher and her principal would agree! 

We have loved this learning experience of having her home, but we’re still counting down the days until she gets to go back and spend the day at school with all of her friends and various teachers that help in the school. 

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Can A Worksheet Do That? Teaching Social Studies in a Hands-On Way

We recently made the decision to pull my daughter from school and do “distance learning” for a short time because we had a new virus or sickness in our home every week and it wasn’t sustainable anymore (more on that story to come later). 

Luckily, the school was able to work with us to make her a “distance learner” because of Covid protocols still in place, instead of unenrolling and re-enrolling her when she’s ready to head back. 

She is in kindergarten, so the workload is fairly easy and somewhat hands-on. However, one worksheet for social studies looked like this: 

Photo: A group of neighbors with adults and children standing around, laughing, and talking. Food is being exchanged. 

Text on photo: Talk About It: Essential Question. Who are your neighbors? 

Text: Talk about how these people are being good neighbors. Draw and write about one way you can be a good neighbor. 

Writing prompt: I can be a good neighbor by 

I am sure this worksheet sparks great conversations in classrooms and it gives the students a chance to draw and write about what they’re talking about. 

The only requirement for my daughter was to do everything this page said. Talk about it, write about it, and draw a picture. Then she would have been done with the assignment and moved on. 

But what did she learn from that interaction? 

Are we really learning social studies with this worksheet, or are we learning conversation skills, writing, and drawing? 

How can we do this… better? 

We started with a picture book.

Good Morning Neighbor by Davide Cali and Maria Dek 

I highly recommend keeping this one in your personal library, it’s a good one with many applications. 

After reading the book, the discussion started.

Who are our neighbors? What nice things have they done for us? What nice things have we done for them? Why is it important to be a good neighbor? 

And then we took it one step further, what can we do for one of our neighbors today?

This led us to making and delivering dinner and cookies for a neighbor that we knew was sick. We also stopped next door to an elderly widow and chatted with her for a while, asking her if she needed anything. On our way out, we quickly shoveled her driveway and cleared her car of snow and ice. 

On our walk home, we noticed that another neighbor near us had some rugs left outside on their doorstep that had blown into the yard from the high winds. We spent a few minutes gathering them up and stacking them on the doorstep since they were not home to take them inside. 

Once we were finally home, we pulled out the worksheet, and my daughter felt like she was ready to write a whole paper on ways she could be a good neighbor. She wanted to give the full story of everything we accomplished in our afternoon of service. Instead, we settled on a simple few-word sentence, and then she was able to tell her teacher the whole story the next time we went into the school to bring back her finished schoolwork. 

Looking at it overall, how much would she have taken away if we would have had the discussion and written the sentence? She would have practice in writing, that’s for sure. But the whole point was to focus on social studies. What did she take away from a social studies standpoint? 

She would probably know that she needs to be a good neighbor. And maybe have some ideas on how she can be that will stick around in her mind for a few weeks, maybe up to a month. Nothing would stick around long-term. 

But after spending an hour serving our own neighbors, the lesson will engrain itself in her mind more than a light discussion and sentence writing ever would. 

Now I know delivering dinner and sitting down to an afternoon chat with everyone’s neighbor isn’t doable in a full classroom. So what can we do in a classroom of 25+ students to give them a similar experience? 

Talk about neighbors within the classroom. Our neighbors in a classroom are our friends sitting by us, but all together, we are a full community. Discuss ways we can be a good neighbor within our own classroom. 

Give them opportunities to draw pictures or notes for their neighbors. Maybe create crafts or pick treats for their neighbors. Let them practice helping their neighbor when zipping up coats to go outside, or picking up trash around their desk during messy play. 

If you’re creating an uplifting, teamwork environment in the small community of your classroom, it will eventually translate itself into their daily life and show in small ways around the school and in their neighborhoods.

Can filling out a worksheet accomplish that? 

Photo by Katerina Holmes