Trying Something New

Have you ever tried to teach “The Star Spangled Banner?”

It’s hard.

The lyrics are hard. The melody is hard. The whole thing is hard. Yet I believe it needs to be taught, and it’s in each of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade textbooks, and so I teach it to my 4th and 5th graders each year.

On the 4th week of the SSB unit each year, I have the students put together a word puzzle. In order to do the puzzle, they have to know the lyrics (or at least have a general idea of the story that goes with the lyrics). Historically, most of my students have gotten the first part right: “Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?” But after that, it’s usually been a hot mess. Even when I played the song for them to check their work, students struggled to get the puzzle right. Like I said, they lyrics are hard.

So I had an idea today. I knew that I had a class of struggling readers and that doing a word puzzle was going to be more of a challenge than usual. So I decided to let them to do the puzzles with a lyric sheet to guide them. Their job, then, became matching text to text and putting it in the right order. Once they successfully did that, then they could try the puzzle without any help.

Friends: Today’s lesson was so much more effective than many of my lessons from the past! I simply needed to try something new.

New things don’t always work. In fact, they sometimes miserably fail. It’s then that we have a choice: Go back to what we know or take another leap of faith and dive into yet another new thing. Sometimes we do need to go back—sometimes we need to stick with what’s tried and true. But sometimes we need to keep on leaping until we land comfortably (or at least peacefully) on something or in somewhere new.

Today I took a leap and landed exactly where I needed to be. What about you? What’s something new you’ve tried recently? Did it work? Did you need to go back? Did you keep trying until you landed where you needed to be?

God: Give us the wisdom and discernment to know when we need to stick with what’s tried and true and when we need to try something new. You are the God of yesterday and today, past and future, here and there, tomorrow and beyond, so help us as we seek to know what to do and which direction to go. Here we are leaping…Amen.