STOP, DROP and ROLL!
As teachers, we have an agenda. We have a lesson plan we are trying to teach, a game we are trying to lead, a craft we are trying to complete, or some other activity that we prayed about, planned, prepared and now are trying to pull off. But often our children have other ideas about how the time in the classroom is going to be spent. There is an old children’s ministry saying that goes, “If you don’t have a plan for the kids, they’ll have a plan for you!” What do you do when you are trying to lead young children in one direction and they are moving in an entirely different direction? We usually tell them to stop what they are doing and to do what we tell them to do. Does this work? Not usually. Someone once defined insanity as taking something that doesn’t work and working harder at it. When children don’t respond well to our request to stop and obey, we have a conflict. In the classroom we are dealing with other peoples’ children, so we lack the authority and leverage we’d normally have over our own children, so we feel rather powerless. We try…
