Just Go With the Flow

Teaching is one of those jobs that requires a lot of planning. And I mean A LOT of planning. Every minute of the day is taken into consideration and put to good use well in advance of the actual date so you always know what you are doing when and have everything prepared for when it is actually needed. Otherwise, you can just imagine the chaos: 20 kids, nothing to do. Not a good scene.

However, after having said that, we all know that things rarely, if ever, go as planned. And today was one of those days.

I had 45 minutes after math this afternoon which I had decided to use for a Language Arts lesson (that I was supposed to have done last week) on capitalization in book titles. I got the kids on the carpet ready for the lesson and proceeded to lead them into the topic. I had several books from our class library to show as examples for the children to identify which words had capital letters and which ones didn't.

One of the books I had chosen was The Bear Went Over the Mountain (which as you probably know is also a song). I showed the book cover and rambled on about capital letters, asking the kids to tell me which words were capitalized, etc. What ensued was:

"Oh I read that book."

"That's a song."

"I like that song."

I decided at this point that they had been on the carpet long enough and it was time to get on with the activity. I went over to my desk to get the sheets (always a mistake), and as I did, they spontaneously burst into song!

"The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain..."

Clearly they were not where I was with the lesson.

So I scrapped my plans and just went with it. We sang the song, acted it out, and then sang and acted. And it was fun. It was espeically good because the book/song ends with the bear falling asleep, so by the end of it all I even got them calmed down (which is what I was trying to do with the carpet time in the first place way back at the beginning of MY lesson).

Then they went back to their desks and wrote about what they thought the bear saw when he went over the mountain. Not exactly a lesson on capital letters, but sometimes you just gotta go with the flow!