Over the past few weeks, I’ve thought a lot about how I can best support teachers right now while they try to figure out how to best do distance learning. I’ve spent days converting my existing resources to have digital components, and I continue to do so. This morning it dawned on me that I have SO many lessons that I developed and shared while I was teaching in a 1:1 model. However, I rarely shared that part of the lesson because I knew that most teachers and students simply didn’t have this type of access. Oh, how things have changed!

So today, I want to highlight some of my favorite lessons that you can easily adapt to be used with your students via any online platform. There are a few new lessons, and for those that have been shared on Teaching With a Mountain View before, each one includes both a new digital access link and a link to learn more about the original lesson here on my blog!

A note on YouTube videos:

While I preview all of the videos I share, I still can’t control the advertisements that pop up or any changes that may occur. If possible, I’d recommend using Safe Share to share the YouTube videos with your students. I have also worded these lessons so that you can swap out videos that you’d like to use if you don’t like the ones I have selected. 🙂

Distance Learning Lessons

Text Structure Candy Videos

This resource was originally one that was only sent to my subscribers, but it’s SO perfect for distance learning, I’m including it here! Students watch a variety of videos all on the same topic (candy!) and determine which text structure it most likely represents. Click HERE for the free distance learning version of using videos to identify text structures and click HERE for even more text structure ideas (You could easily still do the collaborative activity with students, too!).

 

Character Conflict with Movies

I just added a DIGITAL version of this one so that you can easily assign it to your students! It requires them to watch four different clips from popular movies and identify the character conflict. It’s such a great lesson, and totally doable in a distance learning situation! Click HERE to get the free digital version and make a copy into your drive. Click HERE for the original, printable version and the lesson in its entirety.

 

Dialogue and Using Quotation Marks Lesson

This one is so much fun and kids can totally do it at home! HERE is the original blog post with more information about it, but here is a quick rundown. I had the students get into groups of 3 and record themselves having a brief 15-20 second conversation with each other. For distance learning, I’d encourage them to record a conversation with their sibling or parents. You can give them a topic, or a topic of their choice. Then, they had to transcribe their little conversations into a dialogue. They thought it was the coolest thing ever, and it was a super quick but super effective way to work on their types of dialogue and quotation mark rules! This one doesn’t really have an assignment sheet, although they could upload their videos and transcripts into Google Classroom or slides!

 

Point of View and Perspective Lesson

This is one of the most widely-implemented lessons I’ve ever shared, so I wanted to be sure you could still do it with your students! In this lesson, students watch a clip from a popular movie and identify all of the perspectives in it. Then, they either rewrite the story from a given point of view or they identify the point of view and perspective from rewritten stories, depending on their level.HERE is the original lesson and HERE is the digital-ready version.

 

Text Structures Magazine

This is another very popular lesson that many teachers have already made digital. HERE is the original post about making the magazine. I have digitized the planning sheets, and I’d recommend having students create their magazine in Google Slides for ease of use. Alternatively, they can still create their magazine with pencil and paper and share during a Zoom/Google class meeting!

 

Using Google Draw to Make a Map

This activity is SUCH fun and a great way to incorporate some map skills and geography into your distance learning plans. We live in Colorado, so making a rectangle to represent our shape was easy. You will probably want to find an outline of your shape unless your students are well-versed in using the drawing tool. 🙂 Here is an example of how ours looked when we were done. You can also have them make a map of their street, their room, their house, etc.

 

Titanic Webquest

April was always “Titanic month” in my classroom. I love passing on my love of Titanic to my students. I did make my entire Titanic resource packet digital (you can view that HERE), but I am also adding the assignment I’ve had students complete for years. It’s a Titanic “Webquest” of sorts, where students scour the web (with many site suggestions) to write a diary from the perspective of someone on board Titanic. HERE is a link to the Webquest that you can assign students.

I hope these ideas are helpful to you as you navigate this uncharted territory. Remember, I’ve updated over 100 of my printable resources to also include a digital component. That means that if you already own something that has been converted, there is no need to buy it again. You can access all of my FREE Digital resources HERE.

 

Here are three more posts that you might find helpful: