day to day decisions

During a day with my class of Grade 4 students, I usually have a set of ideas/subjects that I want them to engage in during the day.

Today, we started out with the theme of settlers in the Fraser Valley....but they didn't have much background knowledge about settlers, so some had a hard time understanding and connecting to the theme. I meant for this to be an hour long discussion/activity, looking at how settlers used the natural environment for their needs. Some didn't know what a plough was.

Brain wave! I found a story of a homesteading family in a set of class books. They all had a copy and we read the story and they wrote a chart comparing then and now. I had a well done educational video describing family life in Early Canada in the 1840s....which they watched. There was a picture of a farmer ploughing a field. (yippee) I think most got a good grasp of some aspects of day to day life back then.
At the end of the day, I looked at my Dayplan and saw that we hadn't looked at the Math ....... or to the story I have been reading them over the last week. We didn't start on Science.
But, on reconsidering the day, I think they came away with a good idea of what homesteader/settler lives were like in early Canada and the Lower Mainland.
My latest thinking is....do you do as much as you can...or do you cut back and do a few things well. My thought is to do things well.



Any thoughts?