Top 5 Tips for Balancing Curriculum and Fun

Kindergarten teachers juggle multiple responsibilities, from classroom management to administrative tasks. Greg estimates that if he actually completed every task he’s technically meant to do every day, his workday would be 13 hours long. Teachers tend to over-plan, he says, which is actually a good thing—you’ll never end up without anything to do. But it’s essential to give yourself grace. You won’t fit everything in every day—and that’s okay.

“No one gets it all in,” Greg said. “If somebody on social media, some teacher influencer is telling you they fit it all in—they’re lying.”

Teachers of course have to adhere to their schools’ and districts’ curriculum requirements, but going completely by-the-book erases opportunities for teachers to utilize their own experience and discretion to best tailor their instruction to the needs of their students. Greg introduced the idea of fidelity vs. integrity as an approach to required curriculums. Fidelity, essentially, is complete adherence to the lessons as they’re written, saying and doing only what’s on the paper and nothing that isn’t.

He recommends, instead, teaching with integrity to the material. This means respecting the spirit of the lessons and completing all of the necessary steps, but building on it, improvising, and making adjustments to best suit your classroom, keep kids engaged, and help them learn. It pays respect to the human aspect of teaching — all the experience and skills you bring to the table.

Time is always tight in the classroom. Greg recommends finding flexibility in your schedule by swapping blocks of time or combining tasks. He’s also a proponent of saving time by making certain tasks double-duty. For instance, if a day’s lesson plan includes having students identify letter sounds, try incorporating that into role call or other parts of the day. By combining tasks, you can win back some precious classroom time to use however you see fit. Additionally, Greg will infuse a bit of fun into the required curriculum by taking advantage of holidays and planning themed days — for instance, Unicorn Day, where he covers the standard material but finds ways to incorporate unicorn imagery to make it more fun and engaging for his students.

It’s no secret that sometimes, premade lesson plans often allocate far more time than necessary for simple tasks, or require students to sit and sustain attention for longer than a five-year-old can be reasonably expected to do.

Greg urges teachers not to feel completely beholden to those schedules. “We can’t force a lesson to last a set amount of minutes,” he says. If your students only need five minutes to complete a ten-minute activity, rather than finding ways to stretch it out for another five minutes, just move on. Saving five minutes here and there, even just a few times a day, can really add up to instructional time that you get to use the way you want – to do what your students need.

Use Time-Saving Tools
Teaching is an inherently human profession. There isn’t a computer program in the world that can replace teachers, especially not in early childhood education. What software and other resources can do, however, is save teachers time — time that they can use face-to-face with students, not filling out forms or grading worksheets. Greg shares that when his school adopted ESGI, they found that assessments that used to take up to three school days now took them only one or two. That’s an entire day that Greg gets to repurpose for creative activities, research projects, science experiments, or whatever he thinks his students would most benefit from.

If you’d like to explore Greg’s classroom strategies further, you can watch the full webinar here.