My "Ah-Ha" Moment

My husband and I were recently called as Primary Teachers in our married-student ward at BYU-Idaho. Last week I came home crying from teaching our first lesson. Everything that could have gone wrong did. I mean EVERYTHING.

Children were going crazy running around the room fighting over toys (the origin of which I’m still baffled by), 3 kids escaped and ran into the Chapel during another ward’s sacrament and my husband had to chase him around 3 laps until someone caught on what was going on, others were crying for their parents and screaming, one was trying to hang off of the curtains, and on top of everything else, one little boy had an accident and didn’t tell anyone until he was completely soiled, down his legs and up his back.

I came home and never wanted to go back. I felt completely defeated. I sat on the couch on the verge of tears for several minutes before realizing that I was completely and utterly unprepared for this calling that I thought we had in the bag! Both my husband and I have taught in the Primary before, and we were both Nursery leaders as well. We thought we had this totally handled and that it would be a piece of cake and by doing so we underestimated the power of 10 3-5 year olds, bored, energetic, and totally aware of our shortcomings.

After some time to calm down and do some other things for a while, I came to the computer and started searching the internet for any sources that could help me prepare to tackle this thing called “Sunbeams”. I realized that the more prepared I could be, the better the lessons would go. Having never taught children of this age, I needed to look to some experienced members for their advice. After a quick prayer and a moment of reflection, I began my search. Needless to say, I found a plethora of sites, blogs and articles all across the internet. This was even before I tried calling friends and family for their advice as well.

Everyone seemed to start by saying the same thing: be prepared. Different sites had wonderful ideas on how to encourage reverence, how to keep my cool, what kids of this age find interesting so they won’t get bored, things that I knew that I didn’t have time to just sit by and figure things out myself. We had 7 days until our next lesson and I had to come armed with solutions to the problems that I knew I would be facing.

I buckled down and started listing things that I knew were problems that I saw this week:

• Reverence

• Kindness (we had some rough housing)

• Inside Voices (screaming was a fun pastime of theirs)

• Boredom
  

• Staying in our Chairs

• Participation in Lessons and Sharing Time

This is when I realized that I had ideas of my own that I know work really well with older and younger children that maybe others are hoping to find help with. This is what made me have my “ah-ha” moment in starting this blog. Not only am I hoping to document things for myself to reference in the future, but also, so that others may have yet another resource for them to look to if they are stumped and need a fresh point of view. I will try to tackle each category on a later date with some of the tips that I found useful, as well as things that worked themselves out on their own. I still have many strategies that I am in the process of trying to see which works best for these kids. For now, we are working on our upcoming lessons and have a new and refreshed sense of commitment to this calling. Thank you for your support in the trek of mine and I hope that I can help at least one other person and keep the cycle of exchanging information going!