I hope your summer is off to a lovely, relaxing start! I chose this timing for my K/1 post so that I could compile many things I’ve found helpful this year into this one place and make it available to anyone who might find it helpful moving into summer/fall:
- Collaboration and connection with colleagues is absolutely key, especially if you are lucky enough to have grade-level colleagues at your school. It’s also great to reach out to colleagues at other schools and through social media. Check out my previous posts (links below) for some examples of great Instagram accounts to follow.
- Pre-made resources are so helpful. Of course you should adapt them to your students’ needs, but they have been a huge help for me in preventing burnout and showing up better for my students. You can check out these blog posts with my favourite resources for Kindergarten & my favourite resources for Grade 1. And here are some of the resources that I found helpful for remote learning this year.
- Reusing and differentiating resources wherever you can is super helpful. Lots of activities and centres can be tweaked to be more or less complex (e.g. by changing which numbers are used in a number sense activity and colour-coding with orange being 1-10 and yellow being 11-20), and that helps meet everyone where they are regardless of their grade. Things that grade 1s are using at the beginning of the year can be particularly useful in working with your Ks towards the end of the year.
- Be intentional with direct instruction, and consider what might be helpful for everyone (such as printing and vocabulary mini-lessons) and what might be better to teach when your Ks or 1s are working independently on something else (such as teaching your 1s a writing lesson while Ks are working on simple letter practice games).
What are your tips for teaching a combined class?
Madame I Am 