It’s a new year, a fresh start. Maybe it’s the new planner and fresh calendar pages, but the start of a new year makes me want to get organized. Add to that, for my friends in Australia, it’s back to school time—another fresh start and time for organization. Are you feeling it too? Lesson plan templates can help you get off to a great start and keep you on track this year.
As a teacher, you have a lot to do:
- Creating lessons plans and tracking objectives covered
- Preparing and grading assignments
- Completing daily, weekly, monthly, and occasional tasks
- Attending staff and team meetings
- Scheduling conferences or parent meetings
- Doing assessments and writing reports
- Creating resources
- And so much more
Planning is critical to make sure things don’t fall through the cracks and that everything gets done when it needs to get done.
Lesson plan templates keep you organized
Lesson plan templates are an easy way to keep track of your important events, tasks, lessons and assessments. You don’t have to recreate the wheel when it comes to planning. My lesson plan templates pack has you covered.
From a big picture overview of the year down to a daily schedule, the lesson plan templates let you record your plans.
Plan your year
Start by getting a big picture. When do you have holidays and breaks? What key topics or themes do you plan to cover? When do you have key assessments or schoolwide activities? What big events do you have going on in your life outside of school? Get an overview of the year before you start planning more closely.
You can put the whole year on one page, use two pages to give more space for planning or set up checklists for each month of the year.
Plan your quarter
Once you have an overview of the year, break it down into the next logical chunk—a quarter or roughly 12 weeks/90 days. Use quarterly lesson plan template pages to track appointments and meetings, lessons and assignments. Get a 3-month view on one page, broken down into traditional quarters (January–March, April–June, July–September, October–December). Alternately choose a 12-week planning grid. Start with whatever week you want and track 12 weeks at a time.
Quarterly planning is a great way to sort out long-term assignments and projects or to set up longer units. Start with your end date (do you need to do an assessment by a certain time? Are you trying to wrap up before a break?) and then work backward to plot out key points and activities.
Plan your month
Keep narrowing it down. Doing bigger picture planning helps you make sure you fit everything in and helps you create workable monthly and weekly plans.
You can create a monthly overview focused on the school week and add check off tasks. You can break down what happens throughout the month and include weekends in the view. Choose the lesson plan template that works best for you.
Plan your week
Your weekly plan starts getting down to the nitty gritty details. Every level of planning has its purpose and my weeks go most smoothly when I plan them out in detail based on my bigger plan.
I’ve used different formats to set up my week and I have a few lesson plan templates for the week. You can set up a week’s worth of lessons for different subjects.
You can do an overview of the week, with checklists for each day, notes, a daily review, and a box for anything essential that you need to highlight.
You can set up your weekly planner, slotting lessons, meetings, and appointments into actual time slots.
And you can use a mix of the lesson plan templates. I need my daily planner to keep track of when things need to happen, but I find having an overview or checklist for the day really helps me get things done that may not fit into a daily planner—things like which activity sheets to copy or calling for an appointment.
Check it off
In addition to the yearly, quarterly, and weekly lesson planning templates, you may find you need to track other things. That’s where checklists come in. Yes, you may have some checklists within your planning pages, but some things need their own space.
I find having an assessment tracking sheet is incredibly useful. You can keep it in a special assessment section of your binder or use an assessment tracking sheet in conjunction with your lesson plan pages.
And then there’s your Get It Done list. I love checking things off a list. It’s so satisfying. One of the things that helps us knock things off our list is assigning a time to each task. So you can add things to your Get It Done list for a particular day of the week, the weekend or sometime in the month or quarter. Write it down; get it done; check it off!
Even if you use a calendar on your computer or phone (and I admit being able to access my calendar and schedule things anywhere, and all the reminders of events is handy), paper plans make a lot of sense. For the level of detail, you want to get it down on paper. Plus, if your lesson plans are in a binder, it makes it easy to share if somebody else needs them.
Ready to get organized? Get your Top Notch Teaching Lesson Plan Template set. Then just print out the pages you want, put them in a binder, and get planning. Get yours here: https://topnotchteaching.com/downloads/lesson-plan-templates/
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