Sound harsh? Maybe…but it’s true. Preschoolers don’t care what YOU want them to learn…they care about what THEY want to learn. And rarely does what they want to learn come in the form of a worksheet to be completed at 10 am.
When I was a new teacher, I felt like I had two really hard years ahead of me–they would be the years that I chose all my themes, planned all my activities, and wrote up perfect lesson plans. Since most of my students spent two years in my class, they would get one set of plans the first year, the next set of plans the next year, and then they’d be off to kindergarten and I’d continue to the process with the next group of kids. Recycling lesson plans year after year seemed to be the norm and I loved the idea of putting in the work on the front end and reaping the benefits for years to come.
If only it were so easy.
The first time I started the lesson plans on a new theme that the kids weren’t interested in, I quickly realized that my entire month’s worth of activities would be worthless if I couldn’t get the buy-in from my students. They didn’t care about frogs, and no amount of creativity on my part sparked any excitement from them. All of the library books I had checked out with frog characters, all of the art projects centered around ponds and lily pads, and all of the frog-themed small group activities on my lesson plans were total flops. I was left scrambling to come up with new ideas, and the first place I drew inspiration from what the place I should have been going all along–the kids. Planning around their interests made all the difference in the world! Admittedly, I still recycled old lesson plans, but I realized the need for more flexibility than I initially thought I’d need and often switched things up to keep the interests of my students in mind.
Now that I’m teaching in a child-led, play-based classroom, lesson planning looks even more different than it did back then. It can actually be a LOT trickier to lesson plan in this kind of classroom because it requires the teacher to be much more attuned to what the children are learning through their play and requires planning to be much more fluid and flexible. It can also be a LOT more rewarding to lesson plan this way because you realize that you’re really individualizing the education of each child in your class based on their needs and level of development.
As a new teacher, my lesson plans were very task-based. We had a firm schedule and an activity for each time slot in the day. I was required to note which skills each activity targeted, and as long as we covered all domains of learning each day, administration was happy.
My lesson plans today still have a focus on skills, but I’m less concerned with assigning each skill a specific task, such as offering a worksheet to address writing. Rather, I look at the set up of my classroom and ask whether it offer opportunities for those skills to be worked on. If I want students to practice writing skills, I had better have a writing center in my classroom with plenty of inviting supplies for them to work with.
I consider the materials I have provided–do they address the areas my students need support in? If many students in my class are struggling with weak fine motor skills, do I have a large variety of materials in the classroom that require manipulation with the hands and fingers? And if so, have I need to be sure that I haven’t left a gap in large motor activities that would help strengthen those fine motor skills as well.
I determine questions or prompts that might guide the students toward the skills I am working to support. “I wonder what would happen if….?” or “I want you to notice…”. This type of guidance should still leave plenty room for the student to observe and discover on their own, but can help set up situations for that learning to take place when it doesn’t happen organically. We might even start our day with a focus question/idea for the students to keep in mind throughout the day, and then revisit it at the end of the day to see what they learned.
Lesson plans should also serve as a reflective tool for teachers at the end of the day. Did it accomplish what you hoped it would? Did your questions fit with the flow of the day, or did they feel forced? Were the students engaged with the materials provided to them? Did they serve the purpose you hoped they would? If not, what other skills did they address? What would you do differently next time?
As you reflect on your lesson plans each day, you will start to see patterns in what works and doesn’t work for that particular class. You will be quick to hone in on what truly interests the children and find ways to work that into your plans. You will start to see how offering students opportunities for choice during play will hit skills in every domain of learning in ways that even the best task-based lesson plan could never achieve!
Because each class is different, it is important to keep in mind that while you may be able to repeat some activities from year to year, your lesson plans need to be individualized to the group you are currently teaching. You’ll never have another class exactly like the one you have today, and each class deserves to have their needs met with their own, individualized lesson plans. And if you’re like me and have a morning and afternoon class, they each get their own plans too because they each have different needs. It may seem overwhelming at first, like a never-ending lifetime of lesson planning, but I promise that as you move away from task-based lesson planning, you will find it to be less work than you anticipated and the pay-of to be deeply rewarding!