Being Resourceful.

As a CRT we work in many classrooms, with many different classes and lots and lots of students.  Sometime we are given a program to teach and sometimes we are left to our own devices.

When I plan my own "fun" lessons as my backups, I try to use items that I would find in every classroom and does not take a huge amount of time to set up, make or need photocoping.  Knowing what you would normally find in the majority of classrooms you teach in can range from school to school and room to room.  Being resourceful is knowing where you can grab these things from and knowing there will be an amount suitable to your activity.  Art rooms are also a great place to familiarise yourself with.  Magazines and newpapers are usually always avaliable!

So lets start making a list of items you would find in MOST primary school classrooms.

• grey lead pencils
• white paper
• coloured pencils/textas
• ruler
• newspaper
• scissors
• glue sticks/clag
• books - story books/novels
• whiteboard with whiteboard markers

I heistate to put coloured paper on the list at the this stage.  Coloured paper is something schools stock but students work their way through very quickly if teachers are not careful.  I try to use the colours that the students don't like to use for assignments or presentations because they are not bright or pleasing to the eye.  Brown, grey, white and black I find are the ones left over the most.  These colours are great if you direct the lesson in the right way.

The list above is not too bad but it's nothing that most of you don't know already.  We work with these things every day.  The spin I would like to put onto it is this;

Now it's time to work backwards. 

Rather than thinking about traditional activities or how to work these into these activities, work it the other way.  You know what you have and now you need the activities to go with these things.

Creating new and unique activities makes you memorable as a CRT.  New and unique activities are far more engaging than the things they have done many times before.

Because it's your activity, you know exactly what you want the students to get out of the lesson.  This gives you a firm grounding to work on the fly and modify the lesson to suit the needs of the class.  This is an excellent way to ensure you will be able to offer differential learning/inclusive learning in your activities.

Build in opportunities for student reflection.  Try and make sure there's "more than one way to solve the puzzle" to encourage the use of problem solving skills.

Try to include opportunities for some sort of personal aspect through the input of the student's imagination or something that has happened in their life.

Once you have this?  You now have a flexible activity usable at many year levels in almost any classroom.  If you get stuck without a lesson plan there's no scramble to get something working, you simply pull an engaging and enjoyable activity out of your bag and run with it.  You know precisely where to start, you know exactly where you are going and you have successfully turned a possibly stressful morning into an enjoyable activity for the students that will go off like clockwork!

I have a number of these activities and here's the most important part;  You can now enjoy your day as much as the students.  You can recognise the unique solutions to the activity and wonder at how ingenious even the very young can be.  You simply don't get this by giving them standard worksheets where completing them is done in the standard way.  Often the only sense of achievement students will get out of these sorts of activities is being the first to finish.  With your own, unfamiliar, activity?  This opens up the opportunity to congratulate not only the first to complete but congratulate each and every one of them on their own unique solutions.

You can walk away at the end of the day with each of them having learned, each of them having a little more self confidence and the satisfaction of knowing they will welcome you back next time.

Regards,

Mel.