The first days and weeks of school are usually spent building classroom community and getting to know our students, but what happens when you’re teaching remotely? How can you get to know your students in a virtual setting? Here’s your chance to grab some engaging community-building activities to use during distance teaching!
If you’re teaching online, you will face challenges different from those in face-to-face settings. The most effective teachers know that building relationships with their students is essential before great teaching can occur, but if you aren’t together in a shared space, that creates a problem.
Focus on Community and Safety First
Teachers everywhere will feel the pressure to cover the curriculum content right away. With schools closed for weeks in recent years, there’s certainly been a decline in students’ skills, and we’ll all want to bridge that gap as quickly as possible.
I caution you about jumping into that too quickly.
If you teach remotely, you’ll need to spend more time on community-building activities than you would in a face-to-face context. That doesn’t mean you won’t start teaching, but be sure to spend extra time talking with your students.
You will also want to start small when sharing your expectations around the virtual setting you’re using. Let your students do what they need to feel comfortable and build up to full participation. For example, turning off the camera during a video conference may allow some students to feel less anxious about participating.
Communicate Often
Communicating with your students often will make getting to know them easier. Sending personal messages or emails and discussing who they are and what they enjoy will help you find things you can connect over.
- Do you like the same sports team?
- Do you share a favorite food?
- Have you visited the same restaurant or vacation destination in the past?
- Do you have the same kind of pets?
I send home a Getting To Know Your Child form to my students’ families every year. I’ve updated it to include a digital version for anyone teaching online. You can grab a FREE copy of this right here:
Community-Building Activities:
Play Games
Spend some time just having fun in your virtual classroom setting. Some simple suggestions include:
- Have a scavenger hunt.
- Tell silly jokes.
- Host a Virtual Spirit Week (Hat Day, Pajama Day, Sports Team Day, Color Days, Superhero Day, Stuffed Animal Day, Inside Out Day…).
- Play 20 questions about something in the room.
Think about the icebreaker games that you typically play in a physical classroom. Is there an easy way to adapt these to the screen?
Getting-To-Know-You Activities
Activities that involve students sharing their opinions or telling something about themselves are excellent ways for them to connect with other children they have something in common with.
Playing “Would You Rather” games is a fun way to do this. I’ve created this free template that you can use in a collaborative approach to spend time getting to know each other:
I have also updated my first day of school icebreaker activity with a digital collaborative component that is SO MUCH FUN!! Grab that here:
See how the collaborative features work in this quick video:
Another option would be to host Show-and-Tell sessions where students bring a favorite something and talk about it. Any opportunity to share is going to strengthen the classroom community. While you may not want to allow private chats between students during your online conference, you should consider giving students a way to respond to one another.
Listening Exercises
As important as it is for the children in your class to share, it is equally important for them to listen.
An awesome idea for a follow-up to some of the sharing exercises mentioned above would be to have a collaborative Google slides setting where students can share a reflection or reaction to something a classmate shared.
Showing that they’re really listening to their classmates goes a long way toward building trust and friendship.
Just keep in mind that you’ll need to introduce this idea before the sharing activities so that your students understand what you’re asking them to do and are prepared to share their thoughts.
Teacher Connections
While connecting as a class is vital to a thriving community, connecting with you as a teacher and feeling comfortable communicating with you privately will also be critical for building relationships.
I’ve converted my mental health check-in and my “I wish my teacher knew…” freebies to include a digital format. Grab them both FREE here:
Building your classroom community in a virtual setting will be a challenge, but being the fabulous, caring teacher that you are, you WILL make it work!
You’ve got this!!
I have many more digital resources available for online learning in my TPT store!
You might also be interested in the ideas I’ve shared in this blog post:
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