Thinking Ahead

I'm mostly making this post for my own benefit so that I will remember where I've been and how far I've come. If you want to quit reading, I totally understand.

Planning is definitely my biggest challenge in teaching. I get tired of planning and sometimes my lessons fail miserably as a result. I want to be better but sometimes lack the motivation to step up my game and do a better job. Lots of things then trickle down from this because 5 year olds need a lot of planning and preparation. You can't just throw something at them and expect them to be able to do it. That's when things get wildly out of control very fast. Trust me. I know. Anyway, this isn't about something that went wrong. It's actually about something that went right. A few weeks ago we tried to do math with Skittles. Graphing, sorting, counting, etc. It was a disaster. It made me very leery of trying to do jelly beans this last week. I didn't even want to try it. BUT good teachers are resourceful. And thieves. We see what other teachers are doing and we do it to because if it works for them it might work for me. So instead of just giving each kid a scoop of jelly beans and then trying to do 3 separate worksheets without them rolling around, being eaten, or getting lost, I put 12 jellybeans in a little baggie for each student. Rule was that they couldn't open the bag until I said. It was amazing. We counted AND graphed without losing a single one. As an added bonus everyone stayed in their seats and didn't start running around like crazy hooligans. Then, I checked their work, allowed them to open the bag to sort and eat them after I checked it again. If they didn't want to eat them, they could easily take them home. It worked like a charm and I have regained my faith in fun activities. 10 minutes spent counting and putting jelly beans in a bag saved my day.

When you are student teaching, you have to think ahead. You are forced to write lesson plans and think through every possible scenario because you want to impress and you want things to go well. It's too easy to get lazy when that pressure isn't there anymore. Easy to think you are going to have it under control when experience says no way. It's where the rubber meets the road. Lots of work to do.