Teachers Resource Force Blog

5 creative ideas for distance learning early finishers during virtual learning, remote learning, blended learning and hybrid learning

7/6/2021

What do you do when your students have finished their distance learning tasks? Remote learning can be challenging as you try to ensure all your students are learning, progressing and occupied. It can be difficult to find suitable and fun virtual learning activities to issue as extension work for your early finishers. In this article, you will find 5 ideas for your early finishers during distance, hybrid or blended learning classroom; you can also watch the video below!

Distance learning is challenging enough without adding extra unnecessary pressure and stress to students. If your students are completing their work well, then great, why not let them have some free time to unwind! However, if you find your hybrid or blended learning students are keen to have more structure and direction in their virtual learning, then check out some of the following sites below:

ideas for early finishers during virtual learning, remote learning, blended learning

Here are 5 options you can give early finisher students during distance learning:

1. Web-Decks.com - digital colouring pages on any screen
Teachers have always loved to issue colouring activities during downtime or as extension work for early finishers, as it is a calming and creative task for students. But what about your early finishers during distance learning? Fortunately you can assign digital colouring pages for your students too at
web-decks.com! The web-deck colouring pages are the exact same experience as colouring physically, and they work on any device with a finger or pen. So if you want to offer your hybrid early finishers colouring options without the worries of printing and needing resources, then this option is for you.
You can also get 1 week free with a monthly or annual membership to web-decks.com!

web-decks.com online coloring pages. ideas for early finishers during virtual learning, remote learning, blended learning

2. VirtualVacation.us - travel the world from your couch
This free site is wonderful for extension work for your virtual early finishers! It allows your remote students to take a virtual tour of various cities around the world. This is especially wonderful right now as travel is limited, and this enables all students to widen their horizons and experience cities around the globe. There are walking tours, driving tours, airplane tours and even a city guesser game! Your early finishers will enjoy taking a virtual vacation once they have finished all their distance learning tasks.

virtualvacations.us virtual vacations. ideas for early finishers during virtual learning, remote learning, blended learning

3. Radio.Garden - listen to any radio station around the world
Ever wanted to listen to any radio station around the world? Well now you can! This is such an incredible free tool - you can spin around the globe and listen to the radio stations from any country. What a wonderful way to use extension work for your distance learning students to widen their horizons. They can find the most remote places on earth and listen to the radio there, or countries they have visited or wish to visit. A fun activity would be to ask your remote learning students to compare the differences in the type of music or advertisements that they hear on radio stations!

radio.garden listen to radio around the world. ideas for early finishers during virtual learning, remote learning, blended learning

4. FreeRice.com - answer questions and help donate rice
This free site is an educational trivia game with a humanitarian twist! Every time students get a correct answer to a question, they are helping to donate rice for people in need around the world. “100% of all funds generated on FreeRice go to the World Food Programme. They are the world’s largest humanitarian organization, delivering life-saving food assistance in emergencies and working with vulnerable communities to improve nutrition and build resilience.” So by encouraging your distance learning early finishers to play educational games on FreeRice, they can feel empowered knowing that they are helping feed hungry people. What a wonderful way to give back while learning!

freerice.com educational games that help those in need. ideas for early finishers during virtual learning, remote learning, blended learning

5. DuoLingo.com - a gamified way to learn a language
This is a fantastic free tool to use as early finishers work for your virtual learning students, to help them learn a new language! It gamifies learning a new language and encourages students to maintain their streak by practising every day. If they decide to make a profile, they can earn “lingos” which they can spend in store, and keep a record of their progress in all the languages they want to learn. They can even send invites to friends and have a group leaderboard. This site does a great job at gamifying learning a language!

duolingo.com learn a language online. ideas for early finishers during virtual learning, remote learning, blended learning

To conclude:

Distance learning and blended learning can certainly be a challenge. You may be struggling managing a group of students who are working at very different paces: some might be barely completing any assignments while others race ahead and finish work early. It is helpful to have an arsenal of fun and engaging websites to keep on hand as extension tasks for you to assign your virtual learning early finisher students. I hope you find these sites helpful!

Try digital colouring pages for free:

If you want to try out digital colouring pages to see how they work, as they are quite a new thing, then if you sign up with web-decks.com today, you can get one week for free!

There are different options for you depending on how many students you have, but your virtual, hybrid and face to face students can choose whichever colouring pages they like, or you can assign ones you would like them to use. Oh, and there are way more than just digital colouring page decks for your students on that site too, check web-decks out here!

digital colouring pages online. ideas for early finishers during virtual learning, remote learning, blended learning

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Building resilience in your students during hybrid and distance learning in 2021

17/5/2021

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Resilience is more important than ever during this turbulent year as we continue to fight our way through a pandemic. The landscape of education has turned on its head, and you may be noticing that your students are struggling with motivation self-esteem, and other aspects that can affect their resilience. It's important that your students are given the opportunity to reflect on their own resilience and how they might be able to improve it during these challenging times. Keep reading for some ideas on how to improve your students resilience during hybrid, distance or face-to-face learning.

Building resilience in your students during hybrid/distance learning | Teachers Resource Force

Why is teaching resilience so important during this pandemic:

Education has had to take a drastic transformation since the pandemic. Whether you are still in distance learning, moved to face to face learning or a combination of the two with hybrid learning, the educational experience has undoubtedly changed for everyone. School is somewhere for students to have that consistency and routine, and since everything changed last year, this has thrown their lives up in the air. Now, more than ever, students need to be taught how to develop their resilience to deal with changes such as this.

Sadly it is challenging to teach content let alone crucial life skills like resilience, so an effective way of incorporating character education and SEL, is through self-directed self-assessing online lessons. These types of ready to go lessons make teaching these topic much more manageable. They don’t even require teacher input from you, yet will teach your students all about resilience and help them determine the best strategies for how to manage their stress in an effective way.

Ready to go online lesson for teaching resilience:

If you would like a ready to go resource to give to your students, this resilience lesson is completely remote and hosted online. Students go through each slide at their own pace, reading the content learning new information and then they get an opportunity to answer questions on the topic to check their understanding. They will work through realistic scenarios that young people often face and reflect on the possible ways they can choose to react.

There is a range of different question styles to keep the lesson interesting and it also provides immediate feedback to all students; the correct answer is confirmed automatically, which means no more grading for you!

This activity can be set as classwork, home work or remotely for distance learning. It’s fully interactive and so easy to use; there are absolutely no resources required – you don’t even need to grade it as it is self-assessing. Students are able to learn by repetition as they can redo the activity as many times as they need to increase their score.

Resilience online lesson for distance learning | Teachers Resource Force

DOWNLOAD RESILIENCE FROM TPT

DOWNLOAD RESILIENCE FROM TRF

To conclude:

Resilience has always been an important skill to teach students, and in this current climate it is more important than ever as students are experiencing a whole other level of stress. Giving students an opportunity to work at their own pace to learn about resilience in an interactive way and test their responses over and over again, will give students the opportunity to embrace different strategies for developing resilience. Not to mention, the fact that no teacher input or assessment required, makes for a much less stressful teaching experience as well - win, win!

A freebie for you:

If you are looking for another effective way of building resilience, you can use these resilience colouring affirmations. These cards help you encourage your students to think of examples of resilience to help foster self-belief. You can download them for free below:

resilience quote coloring affirmation cards | Teachers Resource Force

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Character Education during Morning Meetings - ideas for 2021

19/4/2021

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Teaching our young people character is more important than ever in these challenging times when everyone is being stretched to their limits. It is tough to find time to teach those social and emotional learning (SEL) skills and character building, but there is an ideal time I have found to incorporate this, and that is in the mornings before lessons take place. All it takes is 5 minutes of guided prompts to get students reflecting on developing their character. You can focus on a different character trait each month to get through 10 different character traits each year! Keep reading to learn how you can incorporate building character into your students during distance, hybrid or face to face learning, in just 5 minutes every day!

How to incorporate character education during morning meetings | Teachers Resource Force

How to teach 10 different character traits to your students in one school year:

I’m so glad you are looking to teach Character Education! Character development and socio-emotional skills are the critical foundation needed for our students to succeed in school and in life. If you are looking for an easy “plug and play” way to teach character in just 5 minutes each day, then this idea is all you need.

Using a resource such as this complete Morning Meeting Character Education bundle is a powerful and easy way to help strengthen your core curriculum for a responsive classroom. It ensures your students get the opportunity to learn how to develop their character by repetition and deep discussion. They are ideal to use for homeroom, advisory periods or as bell ringers for the start of your lesson!

In order to ensure Character Education can be integrated into your busy timetable, this resource has been designed to make it as easy to deliver as possible. You will receive both a structured printable journal and PowerPoint with 200 powerful quotes and 600 thought-provoking writing/discussion prompts, enough for an entire year. What’s more, is that there is no prior knowledge or experience from you required to teach it.

character education morning meetings | Teachers Resource Force

This bundle includes both the PowerPoint and the Journal of the same 200 quotes so you can display the quote on the board while students record their reflections in their journals. This allows for maximum impact and flexibility for you and your needs.

With this bundle, you get daily prompts that encourage students to reflect on particular character traits you would like them to focus on, and how they can develop this trait in their own lives. There are 10 different character traits, one for each month of the school year, so you get an opportunity to really focus on one trait in detail for an entire month. This bundle includes resilience, courage, self-confidence, self-respect, tolerance, leadership, respect, empathy, honesty and compassion.

When you teach character in this way, it also provides a positive start the day! It only takes you 5 minutes and you are safe in the knowledge that you are helping your students develop their character, which I’m sure you will agree, is more crucial than ever during these challenging times.

DOWNLOAD BUNDLE FROM TPT

DOWNLOAD BUNDLE FROM TRF

To conclude:

These are exceptionally challenging times; SEL and Character Education is more crucial than ever to help equip students with the skills they require to handle these challenges. Help build your students' character in 5 minutes every day, and encourage them to be all that you know they can be.

A freebie for you:

free resilience character education morning meeting | Teachers Resource Force

If you would like to try a sample of the resilience PowerPoint and journal you can download one for free.

You will get 4 pages of the Resilience Morning Meeting Journal, 3 slides of the Resilience Morning Meeting PowerPoint, a mindful colouring page front cover for the journal, 9 thought provoking writing / discussion prompts and 3 powerfully themed quotes based solely on Resilience. Click to download them now:

DOWNLOAD FOR FREE NOW

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