C4T #1

In Teacher Tom's blog post Who's With Me? he discusses the problems with formal education for children these days. He believes and practices what is known as play-based learning. For preschoolers being able to play and move around is essential to the learning process. It usually makes a good foundation to start K-12 education process on too. It is becoming less and less of an effective foundation as kindergarten becomes less and less of a play-based learning area. Obama wants to remove the right to run a play based system not only from K-12 but from preschool as well. As a preschool teacher, parent or student you may think that your input will be taken into consideration when shaping the Common Core but you would be wrong. That is what's wrong with the Common Core today. There are too many people who are not teachers/parents/students making decisions on how we teachers/parents/students should conduct our learning processes.

My comment to him was:


In his blog post My Secrets to Lesson Planning Teacher Tom discusses his lack of use of the formal lesson plan. As a PreK teacher in a play-based learning environment it seems somewhat impossible to plan a lesson. How can a teacher possibly know what a child will learn the next day? We aren't fortune tellers(most of us, anyway). Sometimes lesson planning looks different than that, though. Planning a lesson entails more than just steering a young person's mind. It can be said that making sure you have all of the supplies you need present and accessible is lesson planning. Teacher Tom shows pictures of his supplies and their organization and challenges others to get their's in order too.

My comment to him will be updated once he allows it to show up on his blog!