The best "lessons" - or presentations, or, as I prefer to call them, conversations with children - are born unplanned.
Of course I have a curriculum. And I often arrive already knowing we need to cover a certain topic with the children, simply because it fits some program, some standard, or, in the end, my own plan.
"Oh no, but I wanted to do something else - I've got equations, or an animal to research, or calligraphy... and you're here with some atmosphere thing! Why on earth!"
That doesn't mean, of course, that the child won't find it interesting, or that he won't spend the next week absorbed in drawing layers of the atmosphere, clouds, rockets, and so on. But I'm still left with the feeling that I somehow imposed this work on the children, because I needed it to happen.
It's a different story when the children themselves come up with a question - which is exactly what happened with us recently: how does electricity appear? How does lightning happen? What kind of process is that? They went off for the weekend carrying that question with them, and some of them tried to find things out on their own.
I prepared too. I'm not actually a physicist, or a chemist, and honestly all of that was more than 20 years ago in my own life. And the children I work with are still in elementary school. I needed to find the right words, images, and hands-on ways of exploring objects that could help them understand what's happening in nature at a level we can't see.
We sat with the children for two hours, talking about atoms, the structure of atoms, ions and charge, Mendeleev and his table.
A week later, some children are still drawing models of atoms, sculpting them out of clay, studying the periodic table. Asking endless questions. And the children who happened to be absent on the day of that conversation ended up demanding, no arguments accepted, that everything be explained to them all over again. Because it's impossible to watch everyone else's excitement and stay on the sidelines.
I hope that one day I'll grow into having the whole learning process work this way. The children are ready. I'm trying. But there are still obstacles standing in the way.