PARENTING
MAKING THE MOST OF VIRTUAL SCHOOL
TEACHERRECOMMENDED RESOURCES FOR PARENTS WRITTEN BY REBECCA FISCHER
O
ne of the many challenges stemming from the recent pandemic is the need to keep kids home from school. Here are some teacher-approved resources for all of you multitasking, extraordinary parents out there to use to make the most of virtual school.
Jack Hartmann While working with autistic children at a hospital in Florida after earning his B.A. in Child Psychology, Jack Hartmann met a kindergarten teacher and began writing songs for her classroom. They later married, and Hartmann has gone on to create dozens of albums and more than 1,500 “Super Fun Learning Songs” for young children. “Jack Hartmann is my favorite online resource for younger learners,” says Bethany Vokac, kindergarten teacher at Liberty View Elementary in Olathe, Kansas. “He creates music videos for literally every subject. The silly tunes get stuck in your head, which is exactly what many kids need!”
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SIMPLYkc MAGAZINE
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MARCH 2021
Kids can jam along with Hartmann on his website, which offers free videos on a wide range of topics (“Back to School” and “Phonics Songs,” for example) as well as free flash cards and arts and crafts projects.
Newsela Current events provide an awesome opportunity to teach kids about the changing world around them as well as how to decipher between fact and fiction (check the sources!). “I recently discovered Newsela, which has news articles and activities matched to different subject areas,” says Vokac. “It’s especially good for current events, and you can get the same articles written at different reading levels, which helps me differentiate for different learners. This site is really good for upper elementary, middle, and high school.” Newsela is used by 2 million teachers and more than 25 million students throughout the vast majority of U.S. school districts (90 percent of them, to be precise). It was recently fea-
