Continuity of Learning During COVID-19 Resource Database

Use this visual choice board to help young children select and use a classroom greeting while maintaining social distancing.

Tips for helping your child during the pandemic provides families with suggestions and resources for helping their child cope with stress, changes, and staying at home.

Programs can use this form to gather information from families as to the impact from the pandemic and best ways to support the child and family.

This document is designed to guide the Program Leadership Team around considerations for supporting children, families, and staff as they return to the program. The guidance includes Pyramid Model practices you know and encourages you to think about those strategies from a trauma-informed perspective.

Here are tips and ideas for helping children identify emotions when your face, your most expressive feature, is covered by a mask. Use these strategies to let children know that behind the mask, a kind and warm expression is still there!

This scripted story helps to explain to children the how, why, and when of wearing face masks.

Use this tip sheet to help practitioners of infants and toddlers intentionally plan and think about how to reconnect, help children transition back to the classroom, and support children's social and emotional development after being away from the program.

The Unified Young readers Club is a great inclusive activity for a younger audience and accompanies Special Olympics Young Athletes play with books and study guides that support teachers as they address such topics as inclusion, awareness, friendship, bullying, and acceptance to audiences of both students with and without intellectual disabilities. Each book has a theme that relates to multiple state academic standards, and aligns with the precepts of positive school climate initiatives.

The purpose of Inclusion Tiles is to support understanding of the true meaning of diversity and meaningful inclusion. Meaningful inclusion is hard to put into words and action, and these tiles help to start the conversation and support people of all ages along their inclusion journey.

This lesson, featuring Karen McWilliams, a 504 Coordinator and Dyslexia Teacher in Rochelle ISD in Texas, supports educators in using technology to teach foundational reading skills to students in elementary grades using a variety of facilitated activities to support phonemic awareness, phoneme–grapheme correspondence, irregular and high-frequency words, writing, and connected text. The collection, adapted from content developed by the University of Florida Literacy Institute, includes a tip sheet, a video examples, and slides illustrating the lesson.

This Voices from the Field video shares the experiences of four teachers in the Exceptional Children department in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools as they adjusted to delivering instruction during COVID-19 restrictions. They discuss the importance of communicating with families, how they have adapted virtual instruction and used instructional materials, their thoughts for continuing efforts in fall 2020, and their advice for other teachers.

NCSI presented a multi-part webinar series sharing best practices for state special education leaders to make the best use of available resources during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. NCSI and invited experts shared information to help state leadership teams make informed decisions amid current circumstances, ensuring leaders are poised to continue high-quality educational programming for students and families.

This Voices From the Field piece shares lessons learned from Justyn Poulos, director of MTSS at the Office of the Superintendent of Public Education (OSPI) in Washington state. In the piece he discusses how he and his team shifted their annual MTSS Fest conference from a face-to-face event to a virtual event in less than 3 weeks due to COVID-19 restrictions.

To successfully launch the 2020-2021 school year for students with disabilities, state education agencies (SEAs) have an essential leadership role to play in supporting local school systems to plan for multiple scenarios, including services delivered in-person, through distance learning, and via blended approaches.

COVID-19 has caused an unexpected rapid transition to online content delivery for many. Thankfully, there are already many great resources on how to effectively teach online. Here we’re sharing some of our favorite resources.