The kids love the Elephant and Piggie books by Mo Willems. He also does a series we haven't read from yet about Pigeon.

Now he is making available drawing lessons to help us all out during this time.

First, watch the story on the left, then you can go below to his drawing lesson.

He is posting one each day for a while, so watch and draw along.

If you guys do a drawing, take a picture of it with your phone and send it to me. I would love to put them up on this page later! Just send it to my email, george.tabler@oside.us and I'll start putting up the pictures!

You may have already seen this, and it clearly isn't designed for our young students, but it may give you some ideas or an outline to work with at home.

In class, we have routines. The kids know how the day starts, when we go to table jobs, when it's time to clean up, when is recess, when we practice letters and sounds, when we have Dance Party (Friday)... this routine and schedule helps them to have some balance and planning in their life.

It's not quite that simple at home, but if this is a protracted time out of class, and even a month is, then finding a way to put some routine into your day will help a lot.

With our kids, make sure to get some play breaks into the routine.

Our normal schedule is something like this... depending on the day...

8:55-9:20 Attendance, Flag Salute, Cheerleaders come up and review the Seven Habits, Calendar, teacher leads some word or sound games.

9:20-9:30 Benchmark Advance (our literacy program) mini lesson. Usually deals with letters, sounds or word games.

9:30-10:20 Table Work They usually have three jobs to do at their tables... a letter and number writing job, a letter sound matching job (find the picture that starts with F), and maybe a book job or something else. These jobs ALWAYS have one cutting and one coloring job to help develop their small motor skills.

As they finish jobs, they get to go use some of the activities in the classroom.

10:20-10:40 Another Benchmark Advance lesson. This time it is usually talking about a story. Day 1 may just be previewing the story (What do you see? Who is in it? What are they doing?). Day 2 read the story. Read it and enjoy it. Day 3 review the story and talk about fiction/non-fiction, sequence of story, why some things happened or what they noticed.

10:40-11:00 Recess

That's the first part of our day!

They know the routines and the expectations and it makes the day better.

Whatever you can do to establish some routines, with flexibility, will make everyone's day better. I know it's hard and many have multiple students/babies at home. Just do your best and be kind to yourself!