Home Learning Planning Template

Hi Friends! I hope you are all taking care of yourselves and each other as we work to figure out our new normal during this challenging time. I don’t know about you, but after yesterday’s adventures in homeschooling, I was exhausted!! I fell asleep with the kiddos and didn’t wake up until 7:30 this morning!

Before we got started today, I took some time to reflect on how things went yesterday. To be honest, it was chaotic! When I was teaching, my materials and plans were super organized, and that was so helpful in creating a classroom environment that was calm, engaging, and effective. Our learning objectives were clear and I always tried to have everything prepped for the next day before I left the building after school. Knowing that, I decided that I needed to find some more organization at home. I had our daily and instructional time schedules planned out, but I didn’t actually have a place to write down lesson ideas and plans, so I decided to create something to keep us organized.

Go to my TPT Store to download the FREE editable template.

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Organize your home learning plans with this editable template.

Happy Homeschool Day #2! Stay safe!

Teaching Word Study with Poetry

Poetry is one of my favorite vehicles for teaching literacy in the primary grades. There are so many fun ways to use a poem, and the shortened format makes it more accessible to our youngest readers. Poetry can be used to improve:

• Reading fluency through repeated readings

• Reading expression

• Sight word vocabulary

• Phonological awareness

• Word study skills

• And much more!

Today, I’m going to talk about using poetry to teach word study. In many cases, like this one, it was such a natural next step!

We started today’s lesson with some echo reading (I read a line or two, and my 6 year old son, Hudson, repeated me, while following along with the text). Once we got through the text a couple of times, he read it himself a few times to practice reading fluently and with good expression. We also added in some fun movements - because moving is always more fun!! I encourage you to add movement into reading instruction whenever possible.

After reading, we moved onto some word study. I had initially planned to do word study later in the day, after he read his guided reading book, but this poem was the perfect segue into learning about the -ay word family, so we changed our plans.

Poetry as a vehicle for word study

We started by finding all of the rhyming words in the poem. Hudson circled them, and then we identified the spelling pattern together (-ay). We then took out our handy magnetic letter set and got to work creating more -ay family words on our magnetic dry erase board. I love magnetic letters for word study! They add a bit of extra fun to the activity as kids get to move them around and manipulate them. Hudson finished the word study practice by writing his words and a sentence using the words in his word study journal.

I hope you can join in on the poetry fun! For more engaging poems like the one shared above, you can purchase the book Perfect Poems: With Strategies for Teaching Fluency (Grades 1-2).

Happy Reading!

*product links above are Amazon affiliate links. I only share products that I really have and love!

Teaching at Home during COVID-19

When schools started closing across the country as a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, many parents began feeling a bit of anxiety around teaching their children at home over the next several weeks. I feel you!! With all of the uncertainties and changes to our routine, I began feeling some of this anxiety as well. I took this anxiety and turned it into action by getting started on some planning. After seeing some homeschool schedules floating around online, I decided to create one that works for our family. This schedule will absolutely be flexible, but it provides us with a great outline and some general expectations for the day.

Then, knowing that I CRAVE routine and consistency, and that I love a good rainbow color-coded schedule, I took it a step further and created a schedule for a literacy block and math/science block. This instructional schedule will help me to stay focused and organized when I go to plan out each day. It will also ensure that my kiddos are getting the balanced instruction that they need. I’ll spend some time tonight creating an overview of the content I plan to focus on this week and use the schedule below as a guide.

I hope this schedule can help you organize and plan your day while you are thrust into some unplanned homeschooling!