Learning Pod Resources

Many parents have moved to Learning Pod environments for back to school this year. What is a learning pod and what resources are available?

There are several different types of micro schooling options, here are just a few examples.

Pre-School Pod: Because preschools don't have state-mandated curriculum to follow, setting up a pod for little ones is a bit more straightforward.

Pod + Distance Learning: For parents who either can't oversee their child's virtual learning experience or want to supplement it with in-person instruction plus provide socialization for your kids, tutoring centers for grades K-12 can help support the distance learning in a small group setting.

Full-Time Pod: Parents looking to forego virtual instruction altogether for kids K-12 need a full-time pod teacher. This kind of pod falls under homeschooling, and requires following guidelines set by your local department of education.

Co-op Pods: Instead of hiring an educator, some pod parents are sharing the teaching responsibilities. This might mean alternating supervising a small group of kids during their regular distancing learning instruction, and offering support as needed. Or, particularly if you have younger kids for whom distance learning is a nonstarter, it might mean taking turns leading the pod of little ones.

Now that we have reviewed a few types of learning pods, let's talk about the types of resources to support micro school environments.

Learning Bundles: Our Skills Practice Bundles combine learning and fun with specially curated activities from our best-selling books.

Think you don't have the expertise or time to help your child learn? Each bundle provides grade-level essential skills and content to give children that extra boost of practice with just a few pages a day and includes reading, writing, math, and game format activities, plus an answer key!

Set aside a daily "bundle boost" time to help build structure and routine into your child's day. Skills Practice Bundles are designed to supplement learning being done at home with the parent or by the school via the teacher and offer flexibility as you choose which activities and which days you wish to complete them. There is no right or wrong order of activities or order of the available bundles themselves.

Learn to Read eBooks and Worksheets: For years, the best-selling Learn to Read series has provided teachers with engaging stories for their emergent readers. Each book in the series provides maximum support for the child by using repetitive, predictable story lines and illustrations or photos that match the text. Now, to supplement the Learn to Read books, Creative Teaching Press offers accompanying practice pages that have been written and developed to reinforce and extend the skills introduced in each book. For each book you will find the following:

Four skill pages, color-coded and labeled for easy reference
A mini book bookmaking activity
A handy, easy-to-read answer key

Resource books in printed and digital eBook format:

Math Minutes! Each book in this series features 100 "Minutes" to help students build basic skills, increase speed in math operations, and strengthen problem-solving skills. Each Minute consists of 10 problems of varying degrees of difficulty that incorporate a variety of skills. Each ten-problem reproducible can be used as a learning or testing tool.

Grammar Minutes! Now there's a way for students to practice their grammar skills, enhance their overall grammar proficiency, and have fun at the same time! Inspired by the highly popular Math Minutes series!