Remote Ready is my education online blog for parents who wish to engage their child in hands-on, inquiry, and play-based learning during the challenge of remote school. I combine my background as an experienced elementary and special educator with my current work as an active homeschool teacher to two incredible kids.
You may not have more time in your busy schedule to teach, but there’s little ways you can incorporate hands-on tasks into your child’s everyday life! I’m looking forward to going on this journey with you.
Making Our Own Galimotos
Central Idea: Forces make things start, stop and move in different ways Lines of Inquiry: To wrap up our unit on forces and motion in a fun, engaging way we introduced our students to the story, “Galimoto” by Karen Lynn Williams. In this story, a young boy uses wire to make a push-toy car to…
What is Open Inquiry?
What? Open inquiry is a purposeful time of our day lasting about 45 minutes, where students engage in a variety of learning engagements that are connected to our learning objectives. How? Open Inquiry is set-up as stations around the Hub that student’s “sign-up” for. At the beginning of the year, we asked students each day…
Welcome Weeks
In the welcome weeks of the school year, my main goal is to get to know my students. Another goal, is for my students to make the connection that in order to achieve any hopes and dreams they might have for the year, we must create a safe space that encourages risk-taking and accepts mistakes.…
Comparing and Contrasting Stories- Holiday Fun!
Common Core Reading Literature RL.K.9 With prompting and support, compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in familiar stories What? First students compared and contrasted the popular fable, “The Gingerbread boy” with a local take on the story, “The Runaway Injera.” After making treats that resembled each story, students again compared and contrasted…
Weather Patterns around the World
PYP Who We Are Central Idea: Awareness of weather patterns inspires people to create solutions for living safely and comfortably in different places. Lines of Inquiry: What? Students explore their own identity through reflecting on memorable weather experiences and how they needed to respond to different types of weather. How? This project began because of…
Material Lab Activities- Plastic
PYP How The World Works Central Idea: The Form of Material Impacts It’s Function Lines of Inquiry: What? Students have been inquiring into the properties of materials using their 5 senses for observation and the scientific process to test the properties of different materials. Students now have the opportunity to pick one type of material…
More Than, Lesson Than Activities
Pattern blocks are a great way for young learners to explore the concept of More Than and Less Than because they can be sorted easily by color and by shape. Children can start using terms such as “square” and “hexagon” in their vocabulary when talking about math and still easily be able to categorize them…
Graphing Extension: Jo Boaler Lesson
Take a look at the image on the left. What do you notice? You may recognize this image to be a graph. You may also know that this graph comes from a lesson written by inquiry mathematics advocate Jo Boaler. Boaler’s goal in her lesson, is for students to understand that graphs show comparisons. However,…
Tangram Fractions
For this math lesson, I broke my students into small groups and allowed them time to play with tangrams to explore how the shapes fit together. Once they had about 5 minutes to play, I asked them some guiding questions to begin discovering fractions. Of course these questions were basic for my 4th grade students,…
Area and Perimeter of Compound Shapes
As an introduction to compound shapes I arranged pieces of artwork my students had completed into three different shapes on the board: an L, a snake, and a straight line. The artwork came directly from our unit on imagination, where students drew pictures to fill a nine frame square.The kids loved using their art as…
Sonia Richmond 