Kindergarten Teacher's Vibe Guide: Creative Activities

IndustryEducation

HeadquartersThornton, CO

Free guide for educatorsSee classroom use cases, Vibe education features, and more.

Meet Hannah Brown

In today’s kindergarten classroom, you’ll find that coloring sessions and story time look a little different than they did even just 20 years ago.

Daily lessons in preschool, pre-K, and kindergarten classes incorporate technology in more new ways every year. Classes now go beyond having a single computer in the room. Instead, teachers look for opportunities for every child to grow their technology skills.

Hannah Brown, the lead kindergarten teacher at Primrose School of Thornton in Colorado, has seen how her school’s tech offerings have evolved since she entered the field of early childhood education in 2016.

"We have two computers in each classroom, two students iPads, and over this summer we got Google virtual reality goggles," she said. To further enhance the learning experience, the school also purchased a Vibe Board to use in the upcoming school year.

A tradition of advancing education

Brown said that her school’s leadership team began researching interactive whiteboards at the beginning of the last school year. When the Vibe Board arrived, she began familiarizing herself with its features and planning ways to use it in her lessons.

"I’m starting to see how we can make it work," she said. "They could even have this in the preschool class, with learning shapes and the ‘Find the Difference’ game. The kids love those games."

How Hannah's class uses Vibe

So far, Brown’s summer class students have used Vibe's infinite canvas for practicing letters, playing spelling games, and drawing.

"Since we can’t go on field trips anywhere this summer because of COVID-19, we watch one movie each week," Brown said. "One week the kids made cars out of cardboard boxes and we did a ‘drive-in’ movie with the Vibe Board as the screen. It was really cute."

It's incredibly versatile; it's a really awesome board. The kids absolutely love it. They feel like the teacher when they're up there!

As the academic year begins, Brown envisions using the Vibe Board for a variety of lessons. Teaching handwriting, learning shapes and colors, and playing educational games are all possible with Vibe. She said the Board’s split screen feature could also be a fun addition to reading time, explaining, "If we don’t have one of the books we need for ‘Read Aloud’ that day, we can watch a YouTube video of somebody reading it, and I could write the children’s responses on the other side."

Looking ahead with the Vibe Board

The Primrose School of Thornton currently plans on offering on-site classes this fall while following COVID-19 health and safety protocols. In addition to twice-daily temperature checks and masks for everyone 3 years-old and up, class sizes will be limited to follow social distancing guidelines. Brown said that for the most part, the children have taken all of the necessary changes in stride.

"For example, right now we only have four chairs at each table, when normally we would have six," she explained. "So it’s small things like that, where the kids aren’t always in each other’s way, and we encourage them to spread out. It’s totally different, but they’re going with it."

Having new educational tools in the room also gives students something to look forward to, even if class is slightly different this year.

They're loving the Vibe Board. It's definitely a great addition to the classroom.