Distant Learning in Preschool: My To-Go Learning Bags!

Disclaimer: this post contains affiliate links. This means I may earn a commission should you chose to make a purchase using my links. It’s okay- I love all of these companies anyways, and you will too!

Wow, where to begin?! Did I ever think I would have to write a post about things I am doing to support distant learning with my students? Definitely not, but here we are and we MUST persevere through this trying time. Thursday, March 12th was the last time my students and I were together in our classroom. I sent them home thinking we would just be gone for a week and then things would simmer down and I would get to see their beautiful faces again…little did I know.

Hello, my name is Alysea or as I am called on a daily basis, Ms. Alysea, and I am a preschool teacher. Like all educators of all grades all over the world right now, I am somewhere between “I am about to lose my mind” and “I have it all under control”. In this post, I am going to focus on something that I did recently that I was encouraged to do by another wonderful teacher over at Pocket of Preschool. I could only imagine how my students were feeling if I was feeling a little chaotic. I am missing my routine so much so imagine how all of the children out there are feeling when suddenly they aren’t allowed to go to school.

These to-go bags that I recreated were SO WELL RECEIVED that I just knew I had to share. I went ahead and placed a huge order on amazon (I am lucky that I had some wiggle room in my finances to do this, but be resourceful and use what you may already have on hand). I tried to think of things that my students were familiar with, things that they had seen before in our classroom and things that they would know what to do with.

Here’s What’s Inside

And Why I Included them!

• Crayola Bulk Colored Pencils 12 Pack Pre-sharpened: Arts and crafts, fine motor skills.
• White School Glue : Arts and Crafts, Slime Making, Sensory Projects
• Foam Math Dice: Math activities, quantifying, connecting numerals to their numbers, greater than less than games, roll and make activities.
• Crayola Watercolor Paint Set: Arts and crafts, color mixing science, fine motor using paint brush.
• Pencil Sharpener: Keep those pencils sharp for use! Fine motor skills in twisting the pencil in the sharpener.
• Play Doh: Fine motor, sensory play, symbolic play, art projects, letter and number creations.
• Primary Grades Journal with Handwriting Lines and Drawing Space : Daily journal writing, fine motor skills, recalling and drawing events in a book, handwriting practice, letter formation, writing to convey meaning.
• Colored Popsicle Sticks: Arts and crafts, sorting by color, forming letters, counting, building structures, create patterns.
• Pom Poms: Arts and crafts, sorting by color, counting and simple addition and subtraction, recreating letters on a sheet of paper, more and less, measuring items using pompoms as a unit of measurement. Fine motor skill using tweezers to pick the up, create repeating patterns.
• Beads: Arts and crafts, fine motor skills, letter recreation, sorting by color, roll and count out beads for quantifying, create patterns.
• Construction Paper: Arts and crafts, story telling, board game creations.
• Pipe Cleaners Multi-Color: Arts and Crafts, fine motor skills, recreating shapes, sorting by color, cut into different sizes and sort by size, measure things, sensory play, making patterns.
• Thematic Sticker Collection Sheets: Use the theme on the sheet of paper to tell a story. Try and use all stickers in the drawings of your story. Fine motor while peeling the stickers off of the paper.

It’s Go Time!

Once I received all of these items, which thank goodness only took 3 days, it was time to assemble! I got some 2.5 gallon ziplock bags on one of my grocery runs and these are the perfect size to comfortably fit everything! I set up everything in sort of an assembly line on my dining room table and my husband helped me pack each bag. I sealed each bag after putting in a personalized note to each student telling them how much I missed and loved them ♥️

I got permission from each parent to deliver these to their homes. First I made sure they could confirm their address with me and then I gave them a timeframe that I would be making the deliveries. It is also important to note that I made sure to tell the parents that I would simply be dropping off, not visiting. I stressed the importance of social distancing and encouraged the students to say hello and chat with me briefly from a window or something like that that would maintain our distance. Each and every parent respected this and honestly, I don’t know who was happier to see one another, the kids or me!

This was such a subtle way to 1. assure that all of my kids had at least some of the same materials for when we have our weekly zoom meetings, and 2. show the kids that I am here for them, I miss them, and I am in constant support of them!

If you have any questions about these bags, what’s in them, or how to go about making your own, please leave a comment below or message me on my Instagram by clicking HERE. 😊

**For those students who I know have siblings that are around the same age as them, I included some extra materials to encourage playing, creating, and learning together.