It is the start of a new academic year, one has to agree that it never has been this different. Children aren’t bursting through the school gates in their summer uniforms and shining morning faces. Instead, teachers and students are confined at home to stay safe and remote learning has become the order of the day.

While the transition has been slightly easier for senior classes, same strategies just don’t work for learners in the age group of 2-4 years. Children in primary classes have a lower attention span, therefore, keeping them actively engaged through a computer screen may be more of a challenge than we would like to admit.

Am sharing a few things that we have been doing in our school to engage our primary learners via remote teaching during this pandemic.

What can we do to keep our little tots engaged via remote learning?

There is a lot on the internet, but it’s best to customize few things with your teachers for your learners to relate to the content better.

What schools need to do

Set the tone – We created videos on how we can start the day, exactly the way we start our day at school, including prayer, and attendance time.
Get the energy flowing– We made story videos, as well as, rhyme videos that we had already done in the school. We introduced a few new ones too.
Video Calls with familiar faces– We are doing videos call with kids and teachers as they are missing their friends and teachers. It’s important to have these calls where the teachers are listening more than they are talking.

Tips for Parents

Keep kids moving– Let your kids help out with chores around the house. This will help them build their attention span, concentration skills, observation skills, listening skills and vocabulary.
Keep kids organized– Use spoons, cups, keys, books, etc to keep your kids engaged. Playing with and organizing these objects will help kids advance their fine motor development, gross motor development and cognitive development. You can also let kids groom your pets.
Keep sharing– We encourage parents to share their ideas with us and share photos and videos of the activities their children are doing. We are sharing these on our social media.

Continuous Communication and Improvement

It’s vital for all of us to communicate with each other in these challenging times. For this purpose, we are conducting video calls with our teachers for updates on our kids. This also helps share ideas with each other.

We also understand that trying to approach a remote learning situation with the same techniques and strategies that work for an in-person class will not work well. For online classes with primary learners, it is very important to have a colourful background and props made from things at home to keep them busy. So, we are trying to keep a colourful wall, or painting in the background while conducting these classes. This is a constant process of discovery and improvement.

Teaching primary English online

Have you recently started teaching children online and found yourself talking too much? Or have you been teaching English online and are finding it challenging to keep the children curious? If you answered yes to either of these questions, try these tips for making children’s online learning experience a virtual voyage of discovery. Read Blog here for

Online tools which help children be creative
Online activities which are collaborative

Classes Beyond Rooms

How are you dealing with the current shift to digital classroom? We have created a dedicated page with updates to help you in planning your digital lessons. Check it out here