Support for Families Schooling at Home
We want to remind faculty of resources that are already available and make more visible ones that you may not have yet identified.
- A free digital resource NatGeo@Home combines the educational content from the National Geographic Society with those from National Geographic Kids and other tools and services. This includes access to the National Geographic Society’s Learn at Home portal with articles, lessons, videos, other online activities, and more.
- Vanderbilt’s Program for Talented Youth has created an online resource page designed with the gifted child in mind. There you will find several Parent-Led Student Lessons designed by PTY. Further, there are links to the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) which provides parent tip sheets regarding how to talk to your child about COVID-19, teaching in an online learning setting, and links to student activities and virtual learning options.
- (6 months – 5 years old) Many parents are searching for creative and meaningful ways to engage with their children during this time. Findings from the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab project awarded to the Vanderbilt Music Cognition Lab suggest that engaging young children in musical activities may provide a particularly powerful and effective medium for interactions between a parent and child. Find their tool kit here.
- Artists, authors, scientists, and other educators are offering video-based supports for families at home. Their generosity has been captured in this Google Document. This document is being updated on a rolling basis.
- Scheduled broadcast programming has been developed by the Tennessee Department of Education in partnership with teachers across the state and PBS. This partnership is being called “Teaching Tennessee.” It will cover English language arts (ELA) and math for first through eighth grades. Accompanying lesson plans and work packets will be posted on the department’s website for teachers and families to use, adapt, and build upon. Currently, these should be watched in real-time on PBS (1 hour per grade level per week) according to the schedule, but will later be uploaded to the TNDeptofEducation YouTube channel.
If you discovered an article, Twitter feed, or other resources that helped you teach children at home, please share them with us. We know you probably have access to others within your disciplines that could be of use to your colleagues here. We’ll continue to update our list of resources as we identify them.