I am a BC Certified Teacher. I work with homeschool students in a hybrid program- they come to me one day per week and I teach, assess, support, and then send them home with a new week's worth of projects. Technically this is not quite 'school' and not quite 'homeschool'. A lot of people have started referring to it as a hybrid program. There are several on the island that are providing amazing programs! It's worth noting that not all of my students are what you might consider to be stereotypical homeschoolers. Long gone are the days of isolationist parents who wanted to shelter their children from any challenges or different opinions. The majority of my students are homeschooled because of family or personal health challenges. My own daughter is a prime example- my husband is chronically ill with various health circumstances that mean that getting her up and out the door to catch a bus to the nearest school at 7am is not feasible for my family. So what does it mean to plan for a hybrid classroom? The first thing is the year plan- you need to have it tight- what are the outcomes you are going to be covering? Are you multigrade? How can you find an overall theme but still get each grade covered? You probably end up with your themes picked in June. Then you need to abandon all hope for 2 months. You won't come back to planning until you've had time to digest things. Sometime in August you will wake up and have a renewed and refreshed view on how to tackle things. This will get you through September and into October before the parent feedback starts to roll in and you need to switch things up to support the families that are in your class. You aren't just teaching children in a hybrid program- you're supporting their parents and siblings too! I started with a planner- every week it has info for my specific subject mandates- (ELA, SS, Sci, ADST). I include a reading, writing, and spelling piece each week. I also include a project box for the weekly assignment- I typically differentiate this project to include abilities or grade specific information. I use a learning question as guided inquiry and let students choose how they want to share their learning from week to week. See the three images for the Space & Planets Unit that we did earlier this term. Once you have your theme and outcomes you can create your weekly breakdown of projects pretty easily. The trick to differentiating the projects is that you need to leave them open, but still be specific enough that your students meet the learning target. You can see that I use questions as well as guided language, and sometimes give specific guidelines to grade levels. I also narrow down what projects are acceptable some weeks- (Kahoot is amazing!)
Part 2 with the way that I break down and plan for Language Arts is coming up next!
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AuthorI respond to Sarah, Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Smoore, Miss Sarah, (and sometimes Mom!). I have been an DL (homeschool!) teacher for 2 years and am now a proud member of the SD35 team! Archives
September 2018
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