After 20 years of teaching, I realize now that I have come a long way since the start of my career. In my early years, I basically taught straight by the books. More experienced teachers know that to bring forth a successful lesson, you need to go beyond the textbook and use other sources. Now, I actually enjoy teaching my lessons because I am not bound to the textbook or workbook. I use other resources from the Internet and other educational books. I will give you a couple of examples below.
At any grade level, students learn very well by hands on activities or by experiments. By sticking to the book alone, you are very limited in what you can do and most likely the students are not learning enough.
Just recently I taught a Science lesson on shadows. The workbook that we use had maybe one or two pages on this topic. The instructions were to draw shadows on the page. If this was my first year of teaching, I probably would have just had the class turn to that page, tell them what a shadow is, and have them draw shadows. They would not have learned very much.
What I did instead was first of all to tell them how a shadow is formed. This information is not even on the page in the workbook. You always need to first define what you are doing. Then we went outside and located shadows of ourselves, trees, poles and buildings. They were able to see which objects were blocking the light of the sun and the shadow that was cast. Then we came inside and drew shadows that we saw outside on the page. Here the workbook was used as a supplement or follow up as opposed to the main source.
Today we did a lesson on objects that sink and float. The workbook had two pages on this topic. One page was a tub filled with water and they had to draw objects that stay above the water and objects that sink to the bottom. On the next page, they had to show a boat floating above the water and then they had to illustrate the boat being sunk. Again, if these were my early years of teaching, I would have gone straight to the book to start off with. I would have told them that heavy objects sink and light objects float. Then we would have done the two pages.
The best thing to do in a lesson like this is to demonstrate by either using a bucket, basin, container or glass. I took some objects and I asked the class if they thought they would sink or float. In some cases, the children may need to hold the object to know if it is heavy or light. Then I had them drop the objects into the glass to see what would happen.
These are just two examples of going beyond the textbook. There are so many examples that could be given. You don’t have to be bound to a book. Be creative and use all the resources that are out there and available to you. Not only will you enjoy teaching better, but your students will get more out of the lesson.