Teaching children online is hard enough, but nothing can be more challenging than nursery-level kids. Their attention span is short and the content that you can present online is quite limiting, especially if you must teach them 25 minutes four times a week! I’ve spent hours and hours creating and searching for fun, engaging and educational content, and when I find something that is good and free, it’s like striking a jackpot! So here are some of my best findings, I hope they’ll help you in your online teaching too:
1. Dance Party (Daniel Thaiger’s Neighborhood) – This one is great for warmup and movement, but also good for learning action verbs vocab.
2. Count With Allie (Geroge’s Busy Day) – Introduce numbers and count 1-10 in this picture-book-style game.
3 Bubbles (George’s Busy Day) – This one is great for practicing speaking skills by counting aloud. Connect your microphone and the bubbles pop as you say the numbers or clap. Basically, the game reacts to any sound, so you have to coordinate your counting or clapping with the kids the way it looks like they are actually doing it.
3. Monkey Jump (George’s Busy Day) – Also a counting game where you jump with Geroge to catapult the balls from 1-20. This game can be played either by connecting your camera and jumping to move the balls or by clicking, which I do when teaching online and simply tell the students to jump as I click to move the balls.
4. Outdoor Fun (Nelly and Nora) – Help Nelly and Nora pick the right outfit for the weather outside. And then join the girls for lots of fun outdoor games! This game can be used for teaching clothes, weather, and daytime/nighttime activities.
5. Make a Face (ABCya) – Click and drag the different shapes to make a face. Great for learning parts of the face, boy/girl, head accessories, and even emotions.
Websites
6. Story Place (The Children’s Digital Learning Library) – has a number of games and activities you can use for teaching the little ones, like this Color the Rainbow game.
7. Owlie Boo – cute simple games great for learning and reviewing colors, numbers, and animals vocab. The games include dot-to-dot, make an animal, count the fish, and more.
8. Happy Clicks – this site is very similar to Owlie Boo, as it also contains cute simple games for learning and reviewing colors, numbers, and some basic vocab.
9. Tiny Tap – this is a content creating and sharing platform that is free for teachers. Games are click, tap, and match style, and there’s a wide range of topics and levels of quality. Not on the top of my list for toddlers as many activities have been recorded by teachers, and sometimes the sound recording is not good, while there is no option to turn it off. However, you can always find quite a few good activities for numbers, colors, shapes, and basic vocab to add to your daily lesson.
10. Knee Bouncers – cute and colorful, great for teaching colors, numbers, and basic alphabetic understanding. You can sign up for a one-month free trial and test all the games. They also offer three games for free. It also has cute videos that follow the games. The only downfall is that the website is quite buggy, so hopefully, they’ll keep improving it.