I don’t like to plan a class in advance. It seems fake. I wouldn’t order a meal for Friday night on Monday morning, either. How would I know what I wanted to eat so early? When we plan in advance, the message is, “OK, I have this cool stuff to do involving such and such activities, and now I have to execute the plan.
I have found that plans in general limit the spontaneity that we cherish so much in our CI classes. They reduce the mojo. I like it when I don’t know what’s going to happen in a class. It’s not normal, I know. I’m weird. But now that I have found this way of teaching, I have seen that not only does it provide me with a job that is interesting with much more stability than those currently caught in the past, but it also provides for me a way of learning more about myself, who I am, etc. Imagine! A job should do that, right?
So, in the spirit of not planning my classes, I have lately begun to take the tripod with the big presentation paper on it and, instead of putting up the three structures for the story that day (since I don’t target structures in stories any more as per our discussion here last month), I write down the ten things that I am likely to do that day. (That’s why I asked what people’s favorite go-to CI activities are here last week – I am thinking that we have like 30 superior activities to use on any given day and I can’t get to even half of them in my classes – below are my best ten.)
So I write the menu choices down on that big paper and then when class starts, knowing that my kids will be reading for ten minutes, write the SSR quiz for them, do the page locators, and then look at the menu for that day and plan the lesson right then, right before it happens. It’s fresher!
Here is my daily menu in no particular order:
- SSR*
- 4TR or any other CI activity
- Grammar (projected/Blume)
- Freewrite
- Dictée
- WCTA
- Textivate
- Class Poem
- Stories
*The post on the three part nature of this appeared here last week. There is another variation on how to do SSR. I will post on that today. It is called “Read and Tell”.