If you did not know already, I taught Kindergarten for 4 years. During that time, I flipped my instruction. In this blog post, I will walk you through what I did, and how I did it along with sharing the resources that I used!

This whole thing started when I was taking my masters courses in technology. I heard about flipped classrooms and the benefits that could come along with it.  It was extremely interesting and drew me in!

That year was my first year teaching and I was in Kindergarten so naturally, I tried it out! I began by recording myself holding up flashcards in front of a camera and uploading it to YouTube. I sent home a letter to parents with information on where to find my YouTube channel and figured they would do the rest. Boy was I wrong!

I asked parents at conferences if they had accessed my YouTube channel and watched any of the videos. I got crickets!! I went back to check my videos to find that I had a grand total of 32 views of 15 videos. Pretty great statistics if you ask me.

I decided to re-vamp what I was doing. I changed up the tools that I was using to incorporate Movenote, YouTube, Google Apps, and a Google Site. I also turned the focus onto parents and cleaned up the at-home work to be simple, yet informative.

Here is what I changed:
  • The first 8 weeks of school were designated to parent education. I gave two assignments to my parents every week. This helped them to support what I was doing in my classroom, rather than feeding the answers to my students. Here is a folder of examples. The contract in this folder was used when assignments were continuously not turned in. I ran a copy and sent it home.
  • I integrated YouTube videos that my students liked and were informational with Google Forms for lesson summary. Here is a folder of ready made lessons
  • I used a Google Site to house my information. This allowed me to embed my Google Forms and to create a customized look and feel for my classroom. Here is the link, click on Flipped Homework to see what the students would see. Keep in mind that it has not been updated since I stopped teaching Kindergarten.
I would assign two of these lessons per week to students. I tried to have one re-teach lesson and one pre-teach lesson. These changes were the backbone to the re-vamp I made in my classroom.