Hold Off on that Curriculum – Slowing Down Now Speeds You Up Later

image from icanread

You feel the sense of urgency as you enter, the hallways are buzzing with sounds, and everywhere you look teachers and students are engaged in activities; welcome to the first few days of school.  And while we all feel the curriculum rushing up on us, here is why taking your time with your students those first few days will be the ultimate payoff for the rest of the year.

• We are all brand new to each other.  Yes, you may have had their sister, or you may have started a relationship with them in an earlier grade but let’s face it; they are a brand new kid who just wants to be liked by their teacher.  How will you ever find common ground if you don’t find the time to actually hear about their lives?
• We are cementing our routines.  I am not always a fan of prescriptive programs but there are certain routines that the students have to master for our days to get started quickly and for us to work more effectively.  Those routines will not be secured if we don’t take the time not just to practice them, but also to discover and discuss the need for them.  I don’t set the rules but I do show routines.
• We are discovering our rules.  As I said, I don’t set the rules, my students do, so to do that we have to take the time to discuss what we want our year to look like, feel like, sound like.  What do we want to leave 5th grade with?  So we create a vision video for our room on Animoto and we talk a lot about what we need in order to be successful learners.  We do not write the rules down but bring them up throughout the year.  This takes time and that time needs to be given at the start of the year, later on it is too late.
• The curriculum will mean nothing if we don’t get excited.  School has been done for too many years to students so I would rather see students get excited about what this coming year of learning will mean for them.  To do that you have to invest time in exploring just what the year will look like.  We pull our curriculum a little bit apart just so we know where we are headed and all of the things we have to look forward to.  It is wonderful to see a child get excited about something they will explore in February already.
• We relish our freedom.  We sometimes have to unteach certain behaviors because we work a little bit differently in our room.  So instead of always raising our hand to answer, we figure out  how to do “adult” discussions.  We figure out how to work independently, what our help resources are, as well as how to take control of our misguided attempts or abject failures and figure out where to go from there.  Students tend to think at first that I am trying to trick them into misbehaving, they have to see that it isn’t a trick.  This takes time but is so important to the rest of the year.
• We have to build trust.  Without trust our blogging does not work, and neither do many of the other learning activities we do.  I don’t demand their trust, I earn it just as they have to earn mine. Respect and representing ourselves well is something I hold very dear and I try to pass on those values to my students.  If we don’t trust each other to learn together then we cannot overcome all of the challenges we need to conquer.  Trust is a main tenet of our room.

Being on maternity leave doesn’t mean that I won’t have a first day of school, it jst means that it comes a little bit later and there may be changes for the students.  When I go back, I know that i will have to invest the time to start our relationships.  Right now, my 5th graders are not my kids, they belong to my sub, so to become mine, we have to build our relationship.  So yes, I will be taking the time to do so even if that means the curriculum has to wait a little.

Some of the activities I plan on using such as the human treasure hunt, our time capsule, as well as the letter to me can be found as a printable packet on Teachers Pay Teachers with 13 pages of ideas.