When Nature Has Other Plans

Often times in a preschool teachers life she will find that no matter how well in advance she has planned her lessons, things happen that change the course of this discussion. In my personal experience, this has happened countless times, both for the good and the bad. Sometimes these changes are due to faulty equipment or at times due to a more pressing interest in another topic or stimuli, whatever it is, the teachers job is to adjust to these changes and not get caught up with the “plan”.

When I was starting out, I occasionally struggled with that. It took some time for me to really embrace the idea that no matter what I do or say, if the children are intent on something else, I better just go with it. And what I realized from this is by going with the children’s flow, I would find they learned better and they remembered these lessons even years later.

One example of these sudden changes was when I ran into Mother Nature as I taught my kids about animals and bugs. As part of our Math lesson, I had them go through an investigative bug hunt. The task was for them to look for the plastic bugs and pictures of animals I had hidden around the playground and to count the number of legs these bugs had, then we were to chart this and compare which had more or less . Armed with a magnifying glass and a record sheet, we set out in search for these little critters.

Out of the blue, our kuya tells me, “Teacher, there’s a spider in a web by the parking area”. Iiiinteresting…. And so since the parking area (well, not really a parking area, but Teacher Tina’s parking spot) is actually inside the covered area by the playground, off we trooped to check it out. Lo and behold, Mother Nature had better plans for us.

The kids were amazed at the spider! At first they thought it was a toy like all the others, then it started to move! Oh, squeals of delight all over

Charlotte's Web, Playschool Style

Our simple math activity suddenly evolved and became a discussion about spiders, from where the web comes from to what they eat and how they move around.

Those kids in the picture have no moved up to big schools or to the seniors class, and to this day, they remember the bug hunt day as one of their favorites ever.

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