Pirate Lessons ~ Chapter 7

I was reading away....trying to get caught up on my reading and posting, when too many ideas started flowing into my head.  Aaaargh!  My pirate brain is working overtime.

I am sitting with my feet in a baby pool playing water games with my 2-year old grandson.  He is squirting me with water and I am holding the book up and out of the line of fire....still trying to read.

I finished chapter 7, and now I'm trying to make myself read the next chapter.  I can't.  Whether it's his distractions or the thoughts going through my brain I figure I better put to good use what I have been learning ~ out comes my notebook (gotta get those ideas down before I forget them).  The one I am using is a bit bigger than the one I carry in my purse and I don't care if it gets wet.

So here's my brilliant learning thought:
I have some pretty good hooks and beginnings to my lessons.  But sometimes I spend hours and days thinking through the lesson sequence (the transitions).  I had been thinking I need to quit doing that.  BUT....in Teach Like a Pirate, Dave Burgess is telling me that the time I spend pondering, worrying about the order I want present things, is time well spent.  Yes, time well spent rehearsing the lesson in my brain.  Time well spent making decisions about small things and big things.  Decisions about how and when will I pass out papers, will there be music, do I want students on the carpet or at their tables?  All those decisions big and little make an impact.  Great hooks are good, but I don't want to stop the learning by having dead time while I do administrative things or search for a prop.

I love this reminder:
"Your key content - the most important information you are trying to teach - should be delivered at the moment of peak engagement." 

"Far too many times, teachers capture the attention and engagement of their class and then lose it by adding some unnecessary delay between the hook and the delivery of the content.  It's not that I'm overly concerned about lost minutes.  Engagement is the real loss." 

      

Thanks to JCSweatpea, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Ashley Hughes, and KCFonts for their wonderful graphics and fonts.