How we left school. When we switched from in class to online learning, I decided that I wanted to keep with mostly input. This is tough, when you don't see your students and they are beginners. Of course they weren't able to take books home, because we left school on a Friday and found out on Sunday evening that we would not come back Monday morning.

What I do. I decided to continue with stories from home and record videos, then have some short activities. This allows the students to focus on the input and only spend very little time on the activities. Yet, I can see if they watched the videos and have some accountability. (Below is remote lesson 1)

On and on we go. Stories of different genres and a chapters of the book Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Through lessons in the classroom to remote lessons. Here are the next 25 stories, you can also find my first 50 stories and hopefully the next 25 at the end of the school year, though with all the lessons we have missed this year, I am not yet sure if we make it to 100. But no worries, I will keep going with this lovely group plus new students in 2020/21.

This year I have been recording all my lessons in class. Every single story we have done in class can be found on my YouTube channel and is posted in the students' journals on Seesaw.  To see which stories I have told, you can click on the picture bar on the right, which will take you to my Instagram or on the post 50-before-winter-break (another post coming shortly with stories 51-75). This has some wonderful advantages:

1. Absent students can watch stories at home.
2. Parents can see what the students are doing in class.
3. Recordings can be used for substitute lessons.
4. Students can watch stories again and again and receive more optimal input.
5. Easy transition into remote learning.

I have not seen a disadvantage of providing the stories online. Some students have told me that they really like watching the stories again at home after listening to them in class. Others are not making use of the videos as much. Since we know that more optimal input means greater gains in language, my thought was: How can I gently encourage students to watch a story at home each week to receive more input?  Here is my solution.