Writing Lesson Plans

TL:DR Here is a template to write lesson plans. Just make a copy to your google drive and fill in the blanks. Drop down menus provided are also customizeable.

Do you write your own lesson plans? At some point I was asked to write a lesson plan for the first time. And probably because I didn’t and don’t really teach off of already written lesson plans, I had no idea what a lesson plan would look like. I’m sure my first attempt was a mess. Just because you can do something well, doesn’t mean you can write a How To set of instructions to help someone else do it…

Like… it’s not hard to do it poorly…

So as someone who occasionally has to help “train” ALTs, and I use the word “train” extremely loosely, this year I was flooded with lesson plans. I’ll be honest… I didn’t look past the basic design of any of them. My brain just shut off when I opened them all up, they were such a hodgepodge of different styles it made me cringe. But that’s not because they were written badly or by people who don’t know how to make lesson plans. I’m sure they were all wonderful… Just it’s hard to look at something and judge scores of them when all of them are all different looking. It’d be like having a dog competition, but your definition of dog is anything that has 4 legs and and fur.

Sandor Clegane - Wikipedia
Best in show…

So…. I made this: Lesson Plan Template

It’s a google sheet. There are 2 sheets included. The first sheet is the lesson plan template itself with some instructions on how to get started. The second is a ‘data validation sheet’ that also comes with instructions on how to use it.

Bottom left to swap between the two. In the event you’ve never used Google Sheets or Excel. Has to be some of you, we all start from somewhere.

I hope it proves helpful for when you want to make your own lesson plans in the future. I would suggest that my own company adopt a standardized procedure in the future, but my suggestions are received about as well as Firefly was by Fox executives.

Makes no gorram sense…

What are you doing? Lesson Plan

This is an example of my most heavily used activity. The details will differ slightly, but essentially, I want the students to

  1. Ask a question
  2. Listen to the answer
  3. Remember the answer and share that answer with their group
  4. Understand the answer as a group
  5. Write out a sentence using the information they learned from the answer
  6. Relay that information to a 3rd party.

This lesson is marked for the end of JHS first year, so students by this point should be comfortable enough talking to you 1-on-1, and if they’re not then this is the practice they may need. I don’t always make the students ask questions and listen to answers individually, but when the pattern is so cut and dry like this with zero variables for the question I believe it is more than fair to expect them to be able to solo the Q&A.

But you can alter the methods and worksheets as you see fit.

 




Can you ~ ? Lesson Plan

This is a follow up lesson to the I can snakes and ladders lesson plan. It uses the same activity and game, but grammar is changed to question form, and the game is changed due to this. I will provide the lesson plan, the worksheet, and a new snakes and ladder game sheet modified to slow down the game some.


I can, introduction to can lesson

This is a kind of lesson I do with snakes and ladders that keeps the students working in groups, but also frequenly having the teacher’s check their work. It works fairly well in even the most difficult classes I have.


click to open A4


I hope everyone has a nice holiday season. I am very busy right now preparing stuff for winter camps, so uploads will slow until 2020.

Follow up lesson to practice Can you ~ ? with a new worksheet and modified snakes and ladders sheet.

“A lot of characters doing stuff…” who, gerunds, infinitives

A JTE came up to me and asked me to draw her a picture of a lot of characters mid action for an observation lesson she would have the following month. But she wanted to start working on it so she was hoping I could finish it in the next few days. I drew it out on a large A3 sheet of paper with a pencil and then inked it. After I switched to pen any mistake or change I decided on required me to use whiteout and then run the picture through a copier. Eventually the finished product was scanned so it could be added to worksheets.

That picture proved useful for many different lessons in all grades. I eventually redrew the entire thing in Ibis Paint X on my tablet. Now I offer this drawing and a general lesson plan and a few accompanying worksheets to you.

FYI the first two images are png with no background for the most part. So if you’re using a mobile device it may appear mostly black. If you print the image (on white paper) it will be fine. The third image is a jpg so it appears fine.


With names.
Without names.
With 11 blank names, a list of names, and a list of verbs. For the first year activity.