Lesson planning: Most teachers either love it or hate it. Either way, it’s something every teacher has to spend at least some time doing, so it’s worth learning to do well. Whether you’re a brand-new teacher or an experienced educator looking for some new ideas, these lesson plan examples offer inspiration for every subject and every grade level.
Many lesson plans include some or all of the following sections.
Objective: These should be specific and measurable. Often they align with Common Core or other learning standards.
Materials: List any items you’ll need, including worksheets or handouts, school supplies, etc.
Activities: This is usually the longest section, where you’ll lay out what the lesson and its activities look like. Some teachers write these in great detail. Others include just an overview to help them plan.
Assessment: How will you assess your students’ learning? This could be a formal assessment or something simple like an exit ticket.
Differentiation: Describe how you’ll vary the level of difficulty for students at all levels, including any enrichment for early finishers.
Preschool Lesson Plan Examples
Some people think preschool is just playtime, but pre-K teachers know better! Here are some of the ways preschool teachers plan for their lessons.
Venngage
Weekly Lesson Plan
Weekly preschool lesson planning helps you plan each day and ensure you’re tackling all the most important skills.
If you’re focusing on a new letter of the alphabet each week, try lesson planning like this. You can see the week at a glance, including all the materials and books you’ll need.
Since elementary teachers tackle multiple subjects every day, their lesson plans might look like a general overview. Or they may prepare more detailed lesson plans for each topic to help them stay on track. The choice is up to you.
Mrs. Jones’ Creation Station
Weekly Overview Lesson Plan
Don’t be afraid to write out your lesson plans by hand! A side-by-side setup like this lets you see a whole week at once. We love the use of color to highlight special things like fire drills.
Planning a whole year may seem daunting, but it can show you where you’re going to need to stretch a unit and where you can circle back and review. Mrs. D from Mrs. D’s Corner has ideas on how to structure a yearlong lesson plan using Google Sheets.
Tunstall’s Teaching
Guided Math Lesson Plan
This example on adding three numbers together can be altered to fit any math lesson plan.
Lesson planning for special education looks different than general classroom lessons in that the lessons have to cover specific IEP goals and include lots and lots of progress monitoring. The Bender Bunch starts each lesson with independent work (read: IEP practice) and then heads into mini-lessons and group work.
Interactive read-alouds take some careful planning. The Colorful Apple explains how to choose a book, get to know it, and get ready to teach it. Once you’re in the book, sticky notes may be the best lesson-planning tool you have for marking questions and vocabulary words you want to point out to students.
The 5Es stand for Engagement, Exploration, Explanation, Elaborate, and Evaluate. This type of lesson planning can be helpful for students as they work through each of the 5Es related to the topic you’re studying.
At the middle and high school levels, teachers often need more detailed plans for each class, which they may teach multiple times a day. Here are some examples to try.
Busy Miss Beebe
Google Sheets Lesson Plans
Google Sheets (or Excel) is terrific for lesson planning! Create a new tab for each week, unit, or class.
Some people really prefer to write things out by hand, highlighting important parts and making notes as they go. You can always convert this kind of plan to a digital format later if you need to.
This example shows how you can plan out a week’s worth of lessons at once, and see the entire week all in one spot. This example is for history, but you could use this for math, ELA, or social studies too.
5E lesson plans (Engagement, Exploration, Explanation, Elaborate, Evaluate) are great for middle and high school as well. This example is for science, but you can use the 5E structure across all lessons.
At some point, you’ll know what students are doing each day, you’ll just need some reminders for questions to ask and key points to cover. The nice thing about using sticky notes for lesson planning is if you get ahead or behind schedule, you can move the entire sticky-note lesson to another day. (Find more ways to use sticky notes in the classroom here.)
If your school uses backwards planning, you’ll be thinking about the outcome first and working back from there (rather than forward from an activity or task). Backwards planning lesson plans are intensive, but they’re also something you can use over and over, modifying them slightly for each group of students you have.
This kind of lesson planning isn’t for everyone, but the extreme simplicity works well for some. Describe what students will learn, how they will learn it, and how they’ll demonstrate their knowledge.
