As many of us are entering our third week of quarantine because of the coronavirus, I want to check in with you and see how you are doing. I realize that many of you have been working at the speed of light to set up and deliver distance education to your students and you have not really had much free time.
On the other hand, some of you are in states that are not allowing distance education and you may find that you are having trouble filling the days.
I want to share a few ideas with you.
This is the perfect opportunity for you to freshen up your own skills, create new classroom activities and games, and plan great new lessons for your students.
- Fine-tune your teaching skills by taking some of our Master Educator instructor online classes. Explore classes here. These online classes are almost as much fun as our live classes. Plus, the hours will work toward accreditation continuing education requirements and state continuing education, if your state allows online hours. Take advantage of your downtime to finish the last few classes you need for your Milady Master Educator certification.
- If you want to brush up on your soft skills, MiladyPro has a great selection of trainings available. You can check them out at here.
- Take this opportunity to develop and create new games and activities for your classroom. The biggest reason most educators don’t come up with their own games and classroom fun is a lack of time. So, take advantage. We all love a good game of Jeopardy in our classes. Use your downtime and watch some YouTube videos on how to create your own Jeopardy game board in PowerPoint. They aren’t that hard to create; they just take time.
- Did you know you can buy blank game boards from Amazon? Order a blank game board and create your own board game to use in your classroom. Think of any board game that currently exists and think about how you can adapt it to your classroom. I’m convinced that there is a way to use the Battleship game in our student salons, but I never seem to have time to create it. If someone figures it out, I’d love you to share it with us!
- Student salon instructors, use your time to plan competitions that you can use in the student salon. Or, create a marketing campaign for the year to promote your student salon services.
These are all things we know we should be doing, but we never seem to have the time. So take advantage of the quarantine. I know it is tempting to spend the time binge-watching Tiger King, and by all means, do some binge-watching, but take some time to get yourself ready to return to work when all of this is over. You’ll be glad you did!