Kindergarten scenes are always changing

They’ve attempted to catch a mermaid.

They’ve visited the forest.

They’ve been face-to-face with sheep.

For Redkey Elementary School kindergarten students, extended e-learning has been anything but boring.

Teachers Jacqueline Rinard and Stacy Campbell have used a variety of props and “on location” videos to keep things lively over the course of the last month. Then again, that’s not all that different from what happens in their classrooms every day.

“We’re just trying to keep it as normal as we possibly can,” said Rinard, explaining that there’s a lot of dressing up and prop use in kindergarten. “Even though it’s not normal, we’re just trying to do the things we would normally do in a regular class setting.”

Regular changes in decor are nothing new — the scenery changes in their classrooms once or twice a month, Rinard said. She stores her school props and backgrounds in a cattle barn at her rural Farmland home.

She’s been able to use those to take students to a beach setting to read the book “How to Catch a Mermaid” — a lesson that also involved making a “mermaid trap” from household items — as well as incorporating simple household items, like the cardboard box she sat in while reading her students “Not a Box.”



Meanwhile, some of Campbell’s props are of the live variety. She’s invited students into her barn to meet her sheep, incorporating them into “writer’s workshop” lessons about blends — the “sh” sound in sheep, for example — and more artistic work like drawing a picture of the animals. When at school, the teachers would typically use costumes for that lesson.



The goal is to show the students that education is available everywhere, even when they’re not in the classroom

“That’s the important thing that we’re trying to get across to the children,” said Rinard, who also read a book to her students live from McVey Memorial Forest in Randolph County. “Even though we might not be at school, we can still learn with things that we have at home.”

Campbell and Rinard have separate classrooms across the hallway from each other at school, but their students work together as a group most of the time. That’s carried through to e-learning, in which they have separate Google Classrooms but the same content. And when they have their daily video conference with their students using Google Meet, it is as one group.

As much as possible, the teachers have tried to keep a routine with a mix of online content and paper/pencil work.

“Our e-learning, it’s like a well-oiled machine. And it’s very consistent,” said Jessica Lloyd, whose son Aydden is a kindergartener at Redkey. “He knows what to look for … And he just goes through it.”

The video get-togethers, as well as the clips the students share through Flipgrid, are a favorite part of the day for Aydden, she said. He’s also enjoyed hands-on projects, like making an airplane out of a box.

From the teachers’ perspective, both the students and their parents have come through in a challenging situation.

“I appreciate the parents,” Rinard said. “They’ve really stepped up to the plate. Our families have really just gone above and beyond with making sure the kids are getting their e-learning done. … That’s been wonderful to see the families come together and support our kids and support us.

“(The students) handle things,” she added. “They’re like sponges. They absorb things and they go with the flow. They just give it 110 percent. And they’ve probably handled it better than we have. … They’ve gone above and beyond, that’s for sure.

“It’s fun to watch their Flipgrids every day because, their enthusiasm, you wouldn’t know there was anything wrong in the world.”