Tag Team

Last week when we all (well, all but one) had strep throat, it was my turn to teach preschool. Not wanting to expose seven other families to our awesome germs, I canceled. At the time I figured we'd just shift everything by a week, but the curriculum is setup to finish on a certain date before Christmas and my last-minute cancellation would have thrown the schedule out of whack.

So I brainstormed. I looked at my lesson. I looked at the lesson that came after mine that I wasn't supposed to teach. I came up with a solution. Why not combine two weeks into one? In order to show that it was possible I wrote up an outline for how the three hours would flow if we merged two days' worth of material into one, then I emailed it to the other mom that was responsible for the second day.

To my relief, she thought it was a good idea too. Today we put our plan into action and team taught those eight bouncy three and four year-olds. As we setup our materials, we discovered we were missing a few things, but because there were two of us, we were able to juggle and make it work. While one taught, the other would clean up from the previous activity. We would hand off to each other and get little breaks instead of being in energetic-teacher-mode for three full hours.

And now I don't have to teach again until at least the middle of January.

You know, I enjoyed the challenge of combining the curriculum and creating an engaging and functional lesson plan. Once a teacher, always a teacher?