I came downstairs to find my mom watching my daughter and our friend’s child playing at the sensory bin. It’s literally a bin full of dried beans, where kids can stick their hands in and grab and feel and push and scoop and play.
(Pinterest it– it’s a thing.)
Now, think about it for a moment. Toddlers + a bin full of beans = beans everywhere, right?? That’s what I used to think, too.
I walked into the living room and smiled at the girls, “Having fun?”
They continued in their play, and then my mom made a remark about how nicely my daughter played with the beans. She was impressed with how my daughter would keep the beans over the bin and even cleaned up if they fell out. I explained that this was simply a result of training her.
There is no way you can stick a toddler with a bin of anything and expect things to stay neat and tidy unless you intentionally trained them to do so. I smiled with satisfaction. All those years of teaching in the classroom were really paying off. I hadn’t even realized it at the time, but months ago, I had used backwards planning to train my early one-year-old to have at it with a bin full of thousands of beans without making a mess.
What is Backwards Planning?
It’s just what it sounds like, and it’s something we all do at some time or another. It’s basically coming up with your final goal first, and then plotting out the steps backwards, one step at a time, to make that goal a reality. I first came across the official term for it in my teaching program. We practiced coming up with entire projects and units, first envisioning the end product, and then working backwards to make a unit to achieve the final goal. Ultimately, I think it helps you be intentional with everything you do. You waste less time doing thoughtless activities that don’t serve a purpose, and you add meaning and purpose to activities that would have otherwise been thoughtless and useless.
I got to teach two extra weeks’ worth of material to my students without working a single extra day. Here’s my secret!
One morning I walked out to bring my students into the classroom. They were chatting away in line as usual, some with their backs to me, others clumped in groups. Most standing placidly, not thinking about anything in particular. On a whim, I suddenly called out in a commanding voice, “Soldierrrrr straight!” while slapping my arms against my sides, standing tall and proud. I said it with the sing song call and response tone that made everyone impulsively repeat it in the same manner, copying my words and my actions. Suddenly, I had 29 still, silent, serious, and focused students.
I looked at the students, pleasantly surprised, and they stifled smiles, trying to look serious as they stood erect and at attention.
I sly smile crept across my face and I ducked my head down as if to tell a secret and whispered loudly, “AWEEESOMMMEEE. NOW LET’S SEE IF WE CAN GO IN THE CLASSROOM LIKE WE’RE SOLDIERS– QUIETLY AND IN FORMATION!”
Students learn best when they are paying attention. Imagine how much your students would learn if all of your students always paid attention to all of your lessons! Inattention is a pervasive problem in schools, so finding a way to reign that in is key to helping your students learn the most.
One key ingredient to getting students to pay attention is to teach well. Have amazing, well-planned, fascinating lessons for every single subject and every single lesson you have to teach. Boom. Done.
What? You already do that, and some kids still don’t seem to catch on? I hate it when that happens. I mean, I was always on my A-game and had multi-sensory, hands-on, multi-media, technology-involved, exciting and engaging lessons that connected with students’ interests and background… complete with realia and uh… unicorns. Yup. Every time. And yet… I still had kids who weren’t paying attention. Ridiculous, I tell you!
It was just another morning at Gymboree when my daughter got her chunky little leg caught between two dowels in the small wooden boat. No big deal. I stood off to the side and let her struggle to free her leg while offering encouraging comments, “Almost! Ooh good try. You’ve got it! Keep trying!”
She didn’t cry out or complain– she just tried to pull her leg out this way and that. I watched her reposition herself as she tried to maneuver her way out. She nearly had it a few times, and I had to resist the urge to nudge her foot juuuust a little to help her out.
She continued to quietly work away at it, focused and concentrated. I continued to stand off to the side and watch. A few moments later, the Gymboree teacher was passing by, saw her predicament, and immediately leaned down to scoop her up, “Oh, you got stuck! Let me help you out–”
“Oh, no!” I cut in, from my perch on the side, “It’s okay, please don’t help her out. I want her to keep trying on her own. Thanks!”
It all started with the new student– we’ll call him John. He was not only new to our school, but new to the country. He would sit each day in class, silent and expressionless until dismissal, then saunter off toward his uncle without even a good-bye or smile. The kids tried to be friendly at first, but when their attempts were met with a wall of silence and blank stares, they soon lost interest. The students were generally kind to him, but one quiet morning, I saw his look of annoyance as a messy classmate’s papers began to crowd over and onto his desk.
John wasn’t able to communicate his annoyance, and also chose not to push the papers back over. Instead, he simply shifted his seat over to work on a smaller section of his desk. He avoided the problem. That’s one way to deal with it, I thought. I observed as the classmate continued to take over John’s personal space, and before long, John sat, frustrated with just a tiny corner of his desk space left. Finally, he turned and glowered at “Luke,” the offending space invader, with a, “Get your stuff off my desk” look. Luke just looked at him challengingly, then said, “What?” and then continued working.
Not gonna lie. This one’s for me. I currently have about 50 tabs open on fun activities to do with babies/toddlers between 14-16 months, and wanted to summarize them for myself and my husband. So I thought to myself, Hm. Where should I make this list? Microsoft Word? OneNote? Email? …I wish I could just put it on my blog so either Ben or I could find it really quickly on our phones whenever we needed. Oh heyyy… there’s an idea. I do actually search stuff on my own blog (especially recipes) pretty frequently, so I decided to compile my list here for me and for you :).
Anyone with a young child (or expecting to have one in the future) can benefit from this list! Experienced parents, pleasepleasePLEASEpleaseplease add ideas to the comments below! You of all people know how wonderful it is to come across a tried-and-true activity to change up the long afternoons with our little ones!
I sorted the activities into easy, medium, and hard. The easy activities are things you can do pretty much anywhere, anytime. They require little to no purchases or material preparation. The medium activities are still fairly simple, but require you to dig up some materials (scarves, clothespins) or purchase others (blocks, bubbles). Once you have the materials, though, you can consider it one of your “easy” activities. The hard activities are more involved– for the parent. They require more preparation (finger paints), cost (sand and water table) and/or clean-up. They are the kind of activities I would choose on my more ambitious days.
I used popsicle sticks in my classroom all the time. I used them during math, during social studies, during reading– you name it. If there were a large number of students, I had a use for popsicle sticks. Here’s what I did. First, I wrote each child’s name on a stick, then color-coded the tip of each stick– one color for boys, one color for girls:
Then I put them all in a jar, mixed them up, and voila! I just created one of my most frequently-used teaching tools. What could you possibly do with this jar of names? Well, I’m so glad you asked!
I think it’s good to have kids correct their own homework as much as possible. When they correct their own homework, they get immediate feedback on their mistakes (or lack thereof). They also have an opportunity to immediately ask how a problem they got wrong is done correctly.
Immediate feedback is key in student learning. Think about your own learning– if you’ve learned a math concept wrong, would you want to keep practicing it wrong for days before someone tells you otherwise? Or would you prefer for someone to immediately fix it ASAP so you can practice correctly from then on? Of course you’d rather have it fixed right away.
This method of paper correcting is more effective in catching misunderstandings than having the teacher collect a pile of homework, take it home over the weekend, and then hand it back on Monday. Sure, some kids immediately check to see how they did– they’re usually the ones that got everything right. Others just stuff it in their desks without even taking a second glance; oftentimes, those are the kids who need the most help.
Parents: It’s your son’s birthday party. On the invitation, you wrote that the party would go from 12:00-3:00pm. It’s 2:00pm, and you’ve already gone through all the activities you had planned. You told the kids they could just “play” until their parents arrived, and now you have twenty kids running around your house wreaking havoc on your newly polished floors and white walls. EEK.
Teachers: It’s field trip day, and the bus just dropped you off at the museum entrance. For some reason, all the doors are locked and no staff is there to greet you. After waiting ten minutes, you call the main office and are told they’ll be there in twenty minutes. Your students are entertaining themselves– some sitting in small groups chatting, others running around and playing a violent version of tag. Chaperones make a half-hearted attempt to calm some kids down, but let’s be honest– everybody wants to be the cool chaperone, so they won’t go too hard on the kids. Their behavior is already spiraling out of control, and you have another twenty minutes to wait. EEK. What do you do??
Play a game. A simple, quiet, but active and FUN game! Sound too good to be true? Read on and try it, my friend, and be won over.
A few months ago, I led a teacher training on how to use a new behavior system in Sunday school at my church. I outlined how the system of consequences would work, with the consequences progressing from a simple verbal warning all the way to stepping outside for some time out. Then one of the teachers shared her situation with me, “What if the kids want to go outside? When I threaten to send them outside, they say, ‘Oooh, can I go now?’ as if it’s a treat!”
First of all, ouch. That is a low blow, and hard for any teacher to hear– especially when she has volunteered time on her Sunday morning to serve children!
Before I had a chance to respond, another teacher chimed in, saying that we needed more severe consequences– stepping outside the room wasn’t going to motivate the kids enough to stop poor behavior. Ack. This was not the direction I was hoping to head in!
I think I gave some response about the real purpose of consequences (not to punish but to provide consistent reinforcement of boundaries), and how we shouldn’t make kids behave out of fear. But I knew my answer was incomplete. I also offered an example of what I might have said in response to the child, but still… there was something more to it, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Shaping hearts shapes behaviors
Months later, I started reading Don’t Make me Count to Three by Ginger Plowman, and I saw what the missing piece in my teacher instruction was. I realized it was missing not only from that training session, but also in previous posts I’ve written on shaping children’s behavior!
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