This lesson got interesting very quickly. We were planning on doing a class sort with information about the three patriotic holidays listed by the first grade SOLs (President’s Day, Fourth of July, and Columbus Day). We opened the lesson with a preliminary discussion of each holiday. The students already knew almost every fact we threw at them. We froze. We certainly weren’t expecting them to already know it all… now what were we going to teach them? There was no Plan B, nowhere else for us to go. All we could do was finish going through our lesson plan.
I think that many of our students learned one or two facts and enjoyed the class sort aspect of the lesson, but we really should have had a back-up plan. In the future, I now realize, it is important to consider the “already now” situation when planning a lesson. We needed to have scripted a few deep-thinking questions, or had a few super-facts up our sleeves.
Our lesson in no way failed. It’s never a bad idea to ask students to review information they already are familiar with. However, as they review, students should be asked to deepen their understanding, elaborate on their knowledge and complete new tasks with the content. As teachers we must be prepared for our students to already know, understand, and be able to do that which we have planned.
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