Curated Resources for High-Quality, Equitable Distance Learning

Posted March 29, 2020

As we all continue to navigate COVID-19 school closures, we are aware that many of you are faced with an increased challenge to provide equitable access to learning for all of your students. We wanted to share a few free resources we’ve curated from our trusted partners that can support your own professional learning around equitable instruction and that can help your educators and parents with the transition to at-home learning.

If we can be of assistance during this time, please reach out. We are here to provide support and advice as you continue to serve our students.

Professional Learning Resources

• Pivot Learning CEO, Dr. Arun Ramanathan: A School Playbook for Responding to Coronavirus: Four lessons learned from the swine flu (H1N1) pandemic.
• Insights from the Field: How Districts Can Support English Learners During School Closures: Experts in New York, Florida, and California share the initial challenges they’ve observed in English Learners’ participation in distance learning and the supports needed to address those challenges.
• Assessing and Improving the Impact of K-12 Curriculum Implementation in Stockton Unified School District: This on-demand presentation, featuring Pivot experts, walks through an adaptive, multi-year approach to curriculum implementation that can be adapted during a crisis. You’ll also learn the impact this continuous improvement model has had on educators and students within Stockton Unified School District in Stockton, California.
• Quick Tips for Building Systems for Virtual Curriculum Implementation: This free guide offers key stakeholders simple tips for ensuring a successful transition to virtual teaching and learning. Download the guide to get advice for adapting curriculum implementation systems for online environments.
• Free Equitable Learning Recovery Toolkit: Use the customizable tools in this free toolkit to understand the impact of school closures on teaching and learning so you can prepare to provide equitable instruction this fall.
• COVID-19 Crisis Response in Pajaro Valley Started with Listening to Families: This Pivot Learning and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) report — the first in a series focused on how local and state leaders are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic — explains how Pajaro Valley Unified School District created a crisis response that prioritized the needs of its large Spanish-, Mixteco bajo- and English-speaking communities while serving every student in the district.
• On-Demand Webinars: From assessment for dyslexia to fractions and word problems, CORE’s collection of recorded webinars is a rich resource for building knowledge of evidence-based instructional practices in reading and math.
• Blogs: CORE experts share their insights, opinions, and expertise about current instructional practices and educational issues.
• Free Lesson Model Videos: Develop reading instructional skills in phonics, multisyllabic word reading, spelling, and informational text.

UnboundEd

• Blog: Article, videos, and podcasts to increase knowledge about the intersection of equity and standards.
• Disrupting Inequity: Having Brave Conversations About Bias: This toolkit contains everything educators need to facilitate conversations about bias, prejudice, and race and includes materials and resources to guide you each step of the way.

Distance Learning Resources

Many of the organizations we partner with are offering or have recommendations for free online learning platforms, printable lessons and activities, and more to support all of your educators, parents, and caregivers as they transition to distance learning in an equitable way. We’ve compiled a list of these high-quality resources to help you navigate what is available.

ELA/LITERACY

Curriculum Associates: The iReady ELA digital learning platform is now available at no cost. Curriculum Associates also has printable activity packs on their website for grades K-8.

EngageNY: EngageNY provides a full K-12 curriculum for ELA including lessons, activities, practice, and how-to videos.

Five from Five: Find activities, games and videos that are free, easily accessible and enjoyable that reflect the highest quality, up-to-date research evidence on early literacy development.

Fordham Institute: A large collection of instructional resources as well as tips and best practices for effective remote learning.

FreeReading.net: A collection of free activities, searchable by literacy skill, that can be used to teach reading and writing in or out of the classroom.

National Center on Improving Literacy: Toolkits and other online resources to support early literacy development. There are several toolkits specifically for parents and caregivers that provide guidance and resources for developing their children’s literacy skills at home.

Nessy: This online learning platform is being offered free to schools during the COVID pandemic. It provides structured language programs that automatically guide the instruction of phonics, reading, spelling, and writing to children aged 5-12 years. Nessy is effective for all children, including those with dyslexia. Teachers may monitor student progress remotely.

Open Up Resources: This high-quality, comprehensive curricula for grades K-5 reading and language arts is always free. Just register to gain access. Resources to support implementation are also available.

Reading Eggs: This award-winning homeschool reading program provides a comprehensive range of research-based online reading lessons, activities and books that teach children aged 2–13 the literacy skills needed for a lifetime of reading success. A free trial is available.

Society for Quality Education: Free downloadable materials designed to help parents and educators teach children remedial reading and grammar.

Student Achievement Partners

• Foundational Skills Practice Strategy Resource: This downloadable PDF is filled with free, open-source activities to support K-1 foundational skills practice. Activities are organized by foundational skills topic and separated into teacher-led practice opportunities, and tasks that can be completed without teacher support.
• Text Set Guidance: Learn about the many ways to leverage text sets to support student learning across subject areas. This two-page guidance document shares several sources of free text sets as well as guidance on how to use them.

UFLI Virtual Teaching Resource Hub: This site provides assistance to educators as they explore new ways to teach foundational reading skills using technology.  The site has tools for reading instruction and intervention with children in the elementary grades. The materials are designed to be used with videoconferencing platforms for distance education and to create video lessons for asynchronous learning.

UnboundEd

• UnboundEd — Find Lessons: This free collection of lessons, searchable by grade and content area, is an invaluable resource for educators and families as they put together lesson plans to keep kids learning while out of the classroom.
• UnboundEd — Applying Standards to Content: Parents and caregivers are often unfamiliar with learning standards but are now faced with instructing their children. These teaching guides, videos, and podcasts focus on the application of content related to standards and can provide valuable insights.

Zearn: 400 hours of digital lessons for grades K-5 with on-screen teachers and embedded remediation along with paper-based materials that can be used without a device are available for free. To help districts, schools, teachers, and parents/caregivers get started quickly, Zearn has put together a Distance Learning Resource Center with step-by-step instructions to get started, mini-PD webinars, video tutorials, and parent/caregiver packs to send home.

MATH

ArcAdemics: Arcademics are fun video games focused on repetition to build automaticity and fluency with number facts at the grade s 1-6 level.

Curriculum Associates: The iReady math digital learning platform is now available at no cost. Curriculum Associates also has printable activity packs on their website for grades K-8.

Edulastic Distance Learning: Edulastic has developed a new eLearning hub that provides resources for lessons and assessments with tips and resources for teachers and students. Edulastic includes content for ELA, Math, Science and Social Studies.

EngageNY: EngageNY provides a full K-12 curriculum for math including lessons, activities, practice, and how-to videos.

Fordham Institute: A large collection of instructional resources as well as tips and best practices for effective remote learning.

K-8 Learning Activities for Math: Veteran teacher Fawn Nguyen has curated a selection of grade-level-specific math activities (enough for four weeks of remote learning) that support a balance of conceptual thinking and reasoning, fluency practice, and application. These are perfect for engaging students in challenging and creative mathematical thinking as a class or independently.

KenKen Puzzles: Number puzzles that provides fun practice that requires reasoning and problem-solving with elementary school practice with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

Make 24 at 4Nums.com: The application randomly draws 4 cards from a standard deck of cards must use the values shown on the four cards and the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to create an outcome of 24.

The Math Learning Center: The Math Learning Center provides free tools, applications, and lessons for K-5 math.

Math Solutions: Math Solutions provides sets of math lessons with engaging activities for grades K-8.

Mathematics Assessment Project (MARS Tasks): The Mathematics Assessment Project provides lessons and tasks to engage students in applying math knowledge through problem-solving and reasoning at the middle and high school levels.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM): NCTM provides a variety of free resources for teaching math online, including free webinars for teachers, applications, and student activities.

Open Up Resources: This high-quality, comprehensive curricula for grades K-5 reading and language arts and grades 6-8 math is always free. Just register to gain access. Resources to support implementation are also available.

Society for Quality Education: Free downloadable materials designed to help parents and educators teach children remedial math.

Sumaze: Sumaze is an application for Apple and Android devices in which players work through a mazes developing number sense and other skills through problem-solving and mathematical reasoning. Activities are provided for both elementary and secondary levels.

Which One Doesn’t Belong: This website provides a variety of thought-provoking puzzles in which players look at four images or numbers and decide which of the four does not belong in the group.

Student Achievement Partners

• Foundational Skills Practice Strategy Resource: This downloadable PDF is filled with free, open-source activities to support K-1 foundational skills practice. Activities are organized by foundational skills topic and separated into teacher-led practice opportunities, and tasks that can be completed without teacher support.
• Math Modeling Tasks: Help students see the practical ways they can use their math skills to solve complex challenges in the real world. These open-ended math problems invite students to think creatively about real-life situations such as waste management, the national debt, and even ordering pizza—with students designing mathematical models for each situation to help reach rational decisions.
• Text Set Guidance: Learn about the many ways to leverage text sets to support student learning across subject areas. This two-page guidance document shares several sources of free text sets as well as guidance on how to use them.

UnboundEd

• UnboundEd — Find Lessons: This free collection of lessons, searchable by grade and content area, is an invaluable resource for educators and families as they put together lesson plans to keep kids learning while out of the classroom.
• UnboundEd — Applying Standards to Content: Parents and caregivers are often unfamiliar with learning standards but are now faced with instructing their children. These teaching guides, videos, and podcasts focus on the application of content related to standards and can provide valuable insights.

Zearn: 400 hours of digital lessons for grades K-5 with on-screen teachers and embedded remediation along with paper-based materials that can be used without a device are available for free. To help districts, schools, teachers, and parents/caregivers get started quickly, Zearn has put together a Distance Learning Resource Center with step-by-step instructions to get started, mini-PD webinars, video tutorials, and parent/caregiver packs to send home.

ASSESSMENTS

• Achieve the Core Mini-Assessments: These standards-aligned mini-assessments for ELA/literacy and Math are available in PDF and digital format.
• PARCC Release Items from 2018: The Albuquerque Public Schools website provides links to all ELA and Math assessment release items from 2018 for the PARCC test
• Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Practice Tests and Sample Questions: SBAC provides practice tests and sample items for English language arts and math tests to learn how many state tests work, what’s expected of students and what kinds of questions are included on state tests.

VIRTUAL FIELD TRIPS

Explore: Home to more than 300 original films and a massive library of world-class photography from all over the globe, Explore also offers lessons plans to help educators connect students to nature. You can watch animals in action on site’s many live webcams. Peek in on the daily activities of everything from puppies and kittens to bald eagles and penguins.

National Parks — Virtual Tours: Travel Zoo has compiled  list with links to 12 virtual tours of national parks.

Smithsonian for Kids: Free activities and games in art, culture, history, and science. Many are connected to museum collections so provide students with a virtual way to experience the many treasured objects housed by Smithsonian museums.

ThoughtCo: Kids can explore the world without leaving their homes with these seven virtual field trips.

Wide Open School: This free collection of online learning experiences for kids K-12 is curated by the editors at Common Sense. They are also compiling many resources that can be completed offline and on smartphones, as well as bilingual and English-language learner resources. The Access for All portion of the site has compiled a list of organizations and resources to help connect schools and families to low-cost internet and devices, as well as food.

WonderStruckTV: Developed by BBC America, this site offers free nature videos that feature facts and trivia about the natural world.

WorldChannel.org: Monday through Friday tune in online for at-home learning programs for grades 6-12 students. WorldChannel has partnered with PBS LearningMedia to provide grab-and-go activities, lesson plans, and interactive lessons and media that illustrate specific topics or themes and support learning across subjects.

Resources for Parents & Caregivers

• Ways to Keep Kids on Track With Reading During the Pandemic
• 16 Free Online Reading Courses to Keep Your Kids Learning
• mCLASS® HomeConnect®: Resources for families to practice and reinforce important literacy skills.