Has lockdown got you panicking that your classroom community and the relationships you have spent so long nurturing are going to deteriorate after being apart for so long? You are not alone and there are ways to help, even while teaching remotely!

Lockdown has had a significant effect on schools. The fact that you and your students have been apart for so many months is certainly challenging for all involved. It's hard to maintain good relationships when you don't see each other, spend time together, and bond in familiar ways. There is a fear that all those months and years of hard work building relationships between students and yourselves could be undone by the time you go back to school!

This is a concern for a lot of teachers as no one has been in this situation before: these are unprecedented times. No one is quite sure how to navigate the situation and no one is sure what kind of lasting effects this will have, in particular on staff and student relationships.

Fortunately, there are ways that you can help nurture relationships and classroom community using the wonder of the internet and some exciting techniques and strategies that will enable you and your students to bond from a distance. Keep reading to learn some top tips to nurture relationships with your students while remote learning and socially distancing. ​

The first way to help build classroom community and nurture relationships with your students is to get your students journaling. Journaling will help them process their feelings as they deal with isolation and the challenges of distance or blended learning. Furthermore, they will be sharing these insights with you enabling you to understand their needs and what struggles they might be facing. This insight will enable you to support them as individuals, which in turn will strengthen your relationship as you help them through their challenges. If your students have not gone back to school yet, now would be a great opportunity to encourage them to share their experiences of lockdown, how they are feeling, what they did with their time and what fears or concerns they may be experiencing in anticipation of going back to school.

This can all be easily achieved through a journal; you can access a back to school journal for free here that is Google Slides ready, meaning you can share it with your students via Google classroom, or whatever platform you are using to communicate with your students. They can then type directly into the document and share it with you. This will give you the opportunity to read what each student has personally experienced during lockdown and what their struggles and fears are. This will enable you to differentiate support based on their particular needs, and maybe even find connections between students to help build student relationships with one another.

​For example, if you know some of your students might have learnt a new skill over lockdown, then you could team them up and they can communicate their experiences with one another. This will also help build community and bonds, especially if your class are new to one another.

The second idea for building community and relationships with students is doing quick well being check-ins. This can be in the form of simple questionnaires such as Google forms where you ask your students a series of quick questions each day. By offering this, you are providing your students with an opportunity to share how they are doing and raise any issues that they might be having. Knowing students feel listened to helps build rapport, and the responses they provide offer you an opportunity to act on any of their concerns.

You could also incorporate whole-class activities such as Fun Themed Daily Morning Meetings. This particular resource, as an example, focuses on a different theme every day of the week and your students can have discussions or type responses to these prompts. They are a fun way of helping your classroom community bond together even while remote learning. Your class can still have a giggle together on “Funny Fridays”, they can focus on their well-being and supporting each other on “Well being Wednesdays” and so on and so forth.

In addition, it is possible to help build classroom community by using different check-in style questionnaires such as theseGet to Know You Forms. These include “Would You Rather” questions and could even be shared publicly with a whole class, especially if the class is newly formed and doesn’t know each other yet. By sharing the form with the whole class, everyone is able to see each student’s responses and this can help students find commonalities with one another as a starting point for building friendships. 

The third way to build a classroom community during distance learning is through activities that can be played during online calls.

Activity 1 is a scavenger hunt. This is really easy to complete and is ideal for the first few minutes of a call or even at the end of a call to encourage students to stay right until the end of the lesson. All you need to do is create a list of items that are often round around the home, then reveal these items one at a time to the students. The idea is that they quickly, but sensibly, look for the item in their home and show it on their screen. You can even award points or rewards to whoever finds their items first! You can ask them to find a plant pot or some colourful socks and you will see a hilarious range of random products! Students find scavenger hunts really enjoyable and it helps them bond too.

Activity 2 is a virtual show and tell. The idea works exactly the same as a regular show and tell, whereby students will prepare something they want to share with the class, and they can talk about it in front of their peers: it's just presented online instead of in-person, but the benefits are the same. Students will be learning about one another and hopefully finding things in common as they do these show and tell activities.

Activity 3 is a virtual contest. You could arrange for students to prepare for a talent show, for example, everyone has to perform a special talent of theirs, that could be music, art or even their favourite TikTok dances! By sharing their special talents, each student feels valued and listened to and gets to share a side of themselves to help their peers get to know them better and find things in common: all contributing to a sense of belonging and a strong classroom community.

If you would like to use the back to school after lockdown journal to help your students process their experiences and share with you their fears and concerns, you can download it for free below:

The benefits of quote colouring pages has been long documented on TeachersResourceForce.com! I first created them back in 2014 and students all around the world have been using these pages to help their well-being and practice mindfulness, ever since! If they are new to you, you can read all about the benefits of quote colouring pages here. 

So after 6 years, and now with the new arena of distance learning teachers are finding themselves in, I figured it was about time that these quote colouring pages developed into the digital world! Keep reading to learn how these new digital colouring pages work and how you can get your hands on them for your students:

Digital colouring pages work exactly as you would imagine they would! Your students can simply colour exactly as they would on paper - they can scribble using their finger, mouse or digital pen and they work on any digital device with absolutely no software required. Watch the video below to see them in action:

These are not currently seen in the education world and I am proud to be the first to bring them to our schools and young people! Here are some of the benefits of digital colouring pages:

• No more photocopying or printing required for teachers! What a relief, right?
• Students have a complete library of colouring pages to choose from
• They can colour in with any colour on the planet - no more restrictions with pen or pencil sets
• No more pencil sharpeners - hoorah!
• Students can colour in whenever and wherever they like - a great alterative to social media
• These work on any device: phone, tablet, computer, laptop, chrome book... you name it!
• No software is required and there is no learning curve involved
• Ideal for early finishers or extension activities
• Easy to assign as home work or for distance learning
• An easy and effective resource to support student well-being

Here are some ideas for using these digital colouring pages with your students:

1) Set them as distance learning activities:
At this current time, we're not sure how long distance learning will go on for, but even after it's over most teachers will likely to still be setting home learning tasks. Assignments such as digital colouring pages are so easy to set for your students, or they could be offered as optional tasks to support well being, relaxation and mindfulness at home or at school.

2) Ideal for parents to share with their children:
These are not just for teachers! They also make great activities to share with your own children at home. There is no need to print a thing and at least your children will be doing something healthy for their well-being while on their digital devices!

● They're Distance Learning Friendly
These digital word searches are easy to set for your students or own children. Simply share the link, input the password and away they go! All they need is any device and the internet. These digital word searches work on desktop computers, phones, tablets, laptops - anything.

They can be shared via platforms like Google Classroom / SeeSaw or simply via an email link if you prefer. For extra accountability, you could always ask your students to take a screenshot of their completed word search and turn it in to you as proof! What's more, students cannot copy from one another or share each others' screenshots as the word positions of the game change each time ​😉.

● They're Self Assessing
One of the pain points of distance learning is the struggle to offer feedback online. The beauty of these digital word searches, is that they are completely self assessing and provide immediate feedback on success. They are also timed, so students can complete the games over and over again to beat their previous score! This repetition reinforces spelling and vocabulary practice. You could even turn it into a bit of light-hearted competition between your class to see who can get the shortest time to complete the word search!

● They're Challenging and Educational:
Young people are getting enough free time playing brain dead games online, so why not combine the medium they love (technology) with something a bit more educational! These digital word searches are misleadingly challenging too, some games have been known to take a while to complete! The words go in all directions, and there are 20 words in each deck to find. Not only are they completing a challenging game, but they are practicing their vocabulary as they do so.

Some decks even come with bonus extension tasks to extend learning further, such as the one below:

I hope your students and children enjoy using these digital word searches during distance learning and beyond, to brush up on their literacy by developing vocabulary and spelling in a fun and engaging way!