OK, so yesterday I mentioned that I would like to do SSR with my kids. One key element of this is that they have to see you doing it too. Now, I have no problem with this at all; I would love to incorporate this on Fridays since that is our early release day, and the classes are very short, 36 minutes. However, I can also see it getting side-tracked when I have to use Fridays to get everyone caught up to where they need to be, etc. I don't want to send the hypocritical message that "Reading is so important guys. Oh hey, by the way, we won't be doing that because we have to do "X". You don't promise something like this, get the kids to bring a book, and then deep six the whole thing.

OK, SWMBO is reading Never Work Harder Than Your Students, and she shared a neat activity from it, and we had a discussion around it. The activity consisted of two groups: tappers and listeners. The tappers had to tap out a tune, the listeners had to listen to what was being tapped out, and guess the tune. Here's the meat of it though: once we know something, we cannot un-know it. We cannot imagine what it is like to not know a thing, and this is one of the things that makes teaching so difficult at times. We spend all day tapping out a tune for our students, and the whole time we are tapping, the tune is running in our head. It makes perfectly good sense to us, but not to the listener. SWMBO mentioned that eventually we walk over and hum the tune to the listener. AHA! The game is afoot I say! This is the same thing as when we eventually get so frustrated, so run down, that we eventually give the kids the answer. NO higher order thinking took place then, and we end up encouraging lower level "answer-finding", at least that is what I call it.

Are we good at tapping out a tune for our kids? How do we get around the tapping, and get them to hear the tune?