Remote Education

Consider selecting activities from these collections for families to complete at home:

Circle Family Activity Collection

A full set of lessons for children at home that you can align with your current instructional goals. It is designed to offer you multiple ways to share activities that children can do at home with their families to continue their learning and developmental progress. Connect with families and offer supportive, appropriate, engaging, and fun activities.

PALS Spotlight!

Research-based video activities that will help families interact with their children in responsive, stimulating ways that support their social-emotional, cognitive, and language development.

Circle STEM Lab

Through a partnership with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), CLI developed 20 interactive lessons. Set in a virtual laboratory setting, the Circle STEM Lab integrates the video segments with hands-on activities

Consider these opportunities to plan engaging lessons that families can complete at home:

• Send a link to the week of suggested activities for families.
• Consider activities according to the current classroom theme or by specific skill, the curriculum scope, and sequence, or a related unit.
• Use the Teacher Planning Template to create an overall plan for your class. Explicit details in this comprehensive planning document guide you on how to consider assessment data and/or prekindergarten guidelines for planning.
• Select from activities that are directly aligned with the Texas Prekindergarten Guidelines. Filter the list by skill area to view targeted skills needed by children based on MOY assessment results, campus goals, and/or individualized instructional interventions.
• Use our simple family lesson form to send individualized activities to families. Download the fillable family lesson plan.

When sharing activities, we recommend attaching a brief explanation for parents and use this letter to introduce the purpose of the activities: Activity Collection Introduction Letter (English and Spanish)

• Activity Collection Introduction Letter (English and Spanish)

• • When sharing activities, we recommend attaching a brief explanation for parents and use this letter to introduce the purpose of the activities. Logging into CLI Engage will allow you to save activities as “favorites” with My Activities.

• Family Lesson Form
  • Download a fillable family lesson plan to send individualized activities. View the example lesson plan. Use the notes column to provide more detailed explanations on the purpose of the activity, how to engage in it, and why it might be helpful for the child.

• Family-Teacher Goal-Setting Form
• • Use this tool to record an action plan with families for supporting the student at both home and school. It is recommended to be used in direct communication such as parent-teacher conferences, with parents and teachers as partners in prioritizing learning areas for children’s targeted support.

Through a video conferencing platform, the Circle Activity Collection for Pre-K to Grade 2 is a great tool for selecting small groups and whole-group activities. The collection offers activities that you can use for live-streaming lessons to your class or recording yourself doing some of the activities to share with families.

Consider these opportunities to plan engaging lessons that you can do online with your students:

• Consider activities according to the current classroom theme or by specific skill, the curriculum scope, and sequence, or a related unit.
• Use the My Activities tool on CLI Engage to favorite activities and add notes (learn more here).
• Select from activities that are directly aligned with the Texas Prekindergarten Guidelines by filtering with the PKG Index. Filter the list by PKG domains to view targeted skills needed by children based on assessment results, campus goals, and/or individualized instructional interventions.

Supporting Teachers and Families with Remote Education

• The Children’s Learning Institute prepared the following curriculum samples to support teachers to partner with families and deliver remote instruction, using the Circle Pre-K Curriculum and Circle Activity Collection: Pre-K to Grade 2 Classroom that is available in English and Spanish. Also included is the family workbook and toolkits to support school-family partnerships. 

There are two options available:

• 4-week sampler of lessons (not specifically aligned to the curriculum’s scope and sequence)
• 10 weeks of lessons from the curriculum’s scope and sequence for weeks 1-10

Along with remote lessons from the sample curriculum for teachers, there are corresponding Family Workbooks and Toolkits available that complement skills learned in these remote lessons that families can use at home with their children. 

The Family Workbooks include activities for children to complete independently following a remote lesson from the Variety Sample Curriculum or Scope and Sequence Sample Curriculum with their teacher. The activities give children the opportunity to practice targeted skills and can help indicate their knowledge gained from lessons with minimal preparation and supervision. Families can also use the activities to engage with their child to continue supporting learning at home.

Once the child has completed their independent activity, families take a picture of their work and send it to the teacher. This will allow the teacher to assess what the next steps are for children’s learning. Documents, photos, and other feedback from families can be saved in the child’s student profile section under Administrative Tools on CLI Engage.  

The Family Toolkits list suggested materials children will need at home to complete each remote lesson from the Variety Sample Curriculum, Family Workbook, and the Scope and Sequence Sample Curriculum. The suggested materials will help support and engage children with activities to increase understanding of concepts. Using manipulatives and hands-on materials naturally promote home learning experiences as children continually practice skills at home.

CLI has developed and tested alternative administration functionality and protocols for the remote administration of CPM, TX-KEA, TPRI, and Tejas LEE. Please refer to our Remote Assessment Administration page to learn more about best practices when assessing your students remotely.

You’ll find: 

• • Visual schedules to prepare students for remote assessment in  Spanish and English
  • Teacher Guides for remotely administering CPM, TX-KEA, TPRI, and Tejas LEE which include:
  • Sample email to parents
  • Teacher preparation checklist 
  • Handouts for parents
  • Family-friendly language describing each measure being assessed and why it is assessed 

The following training webinars are available:

• • Remote Administration for Circle Progress Monitoring
  • Remote Administration for TX-KEA
  • Remote Administration for TPRI & Tejas LEE

Families should be regularly informed of how their child is progressing in key learning areas. Teachers have a unique opportunity to partner with families by developing trust and communicating about their child’s skills and development.

Share the family observation forms with your families to get their perspective on their child’s development at home and in the community. These are aligned to Circle Progress Monitoring (Pre-K) and the Texas Kindergarten Entry Assessment and are available in English and Spanish. The forms are designed to help teachers collect valuable information from families about how they see their children learning and growing in key school readiness area, whether students are learning from home or face-to-face. If the student is receiving asynchronous learning at home, the family observation forms can be used to collect input from families on assessment observables. Good two-way communication between teachers and families can elaborate on observations to better help the teacher design appropriate instruction in support of the child’s skill development. This is an excellent way to build relationships with families and gather additional data to capture students’ developmental skills.

Parent Reports

CPM, TX-KEA, and TPRI/Tejas LEE parent reports are specifically designed to be shared with families to help them understand their child’s assessment results and important essential school readiness skills. It is a family-friendly way to share student progress to better equip families to support their child’s learning. Sending home assessment data in an easy to understand way is critical to developing supportive partnerships between teachers and families.  (Add link How-to generate parent reports, if available) 

Watch this video to prepare you to access and create a variety of reports for Circle Progress Monitoring, TX-KEA, TPRI, and Tejas LEE.  

Steps for Communicating Data in Family-Friendly Ways Form is designed to be used during parent-teacher conferences. It provides a checklist of effective ways to present assessment data to families to ensure information is being shared in the most family-friendly way possible.  

If you’re sharing details about a specific child’s progress monitoring results with families, be sure to use secure options that are FERPA-compliant, like encrypted email, text messages, or your organization’s approved teacher-parent education sharing platforms.

Recognizing that many families have infants and toddlers at home, consider sharing these resources. 

Developmental milestones can help families become aware of what skills are expected at what ages and acknowledge what the child is accomplishing a first smile, a first step, a first word. To track children’s development from birth to 48 months of age, you can find Developmental Milestone Checklists in English and Spanish here:

•       Developmental Milestones, English
•       Developmental Milestones, Spanish

Circle Family Activity Collection  for infants and toddlers ages 0-36 months

Families can seek and select activities for their infants and toddlers by domain areas and sort by age.