3 Ways to Build Your Classroom Community While Teaching Remotely

Just because you and your students aren’t together in the classroom, doesn’t mean you can’t continue building a strong, supportive classroom community. The ingredients are all the same—respect, generosity, empathy, and compassion—and adapting the social-emotional learning tools and activities you need to maintain that culture of kindness is easy, especially if you continue to model from afar. Here are three ways to foster a sense of community among your students when you’re teaching remotely.  

Plus, inspire kindness inside and outside the classroom with these books and activities.

Make every morning a good morning
Kick off the day and maintain your classroom community from a distance with this Quick Tips! Morning Meeting resource. Featuring creative and engaging skill-building ideas you can adapt for your virtual morning meeting, you’ll not only set a positive tone for the day, you’ll also strengthen your classroom community. With this downloadable resource, you’ll also be able to incorporate songs, chants, and poems into your morning meeting mix and have immediate access to tips for integrating reading, writing, and math exercises that will prime your students for learning.   

Play kindness catch
To build your classroom community while teaching remotely, pair your students’ favorite books about empathy and compassion with this downloadable kindness catcher craft. All they need are scissors and crayons to catch the spirit of kindness!

Keep filling buckets
A classroom favorite for teaching kindness, compassion, and gratitude, How Full is Your Bucket? is also the perfect choice for building a supportive classroom community when teaching remotely. After your virtual read-aloud and review, encourage your students to create a random acts of kindness journal where they document and reflect upon all the nice things they do for their friends, family, and classmates, plus all the thoughtful things their loved ones do in return. Check in with your students every few days to talk about what they’ve written; then help them brainstorm other ways they can continue filling their own buckets and their loved ones’ buckets, too.

Even when you’re teaching remotely, helping your students foster kindness, respect, generosity, empathy, and compassion for one another will help you sustain and build upon your classroom community. For more tips and tool to support your students while teaching remotely, check out these learn-at-home resources from Scholastic.

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