Your Planning Tools
You have books, textbooks, the Internet, other teachers, students, and the world around you to help come up with engaging lesson plans. These tools are necessary, but this still leaves a lot of work when it comes to your lesson plans. Planning works best when you start from the general and move toward the specific. For example, determine the themes of your units before creating the individual lessons within the units.
School Calendar
The first step you should take as you start lesson planning is to create a school calendar. You can use an actual calendar, but it might be useful to simply create your own.
Once you have your blank calendar in front of you, mark off all the vacation days. Then, mark off any dates for testing (if you know what they are at this point). If you know an event is going to happen in a month but you are not sure what the date is yet, make a note at the top of that month's calendar page. For example, if you know that homecoming happens during one week in October, mark that down and determine how many days' lessons you are going to lose because of events, assemblies, and so on. If you are teaching a grade with a required high-stakes test, then make sure to note time for test preparation.
When you are done, count up the number of days that you have left. Make sure to subtract for the days that you noted at the top of each month. This is the maximum number of days you think that you will have to actually teach your students. Now, subtract one more day each month to account for unexpected events that will arise, and you will have a fairly accurate count of what you can expect each month.
Once you have this determined, you can start deciding how many units of study you are going to have in the class and how many days you will need for each unit. To determine the number of days you will need for each unit, you will need to work closely with your texts and other resources to see how much and the type of material you have available. Once you have a tentative time frame worked out, pencil in the starting date for each unit on the calendar. As the year progresses, mark out new days away from class as they arise, and adjust your plan accordingly.
As you plan, it is important to appeal to different learning styles and use different techniques. This is not to say that you must teach to every learning style at every point. However, keep in mind that if you always lecture or always do seatwork, your students will become bored and lose interest.
This calendar will be the foundation for your curriculum. It gives you an overall picture of what you are going to be covering and when. Teachers who do not create calendars often fail to understand why they cannot cover all the necessary material. The calendar allows you to determine if you are on track. You can then adjust lessons to make sure that you meet your curriculum objectives.
Plan Book
Your calendar will work hand in hand with your plan book. The plan book allows you to include more details for each day. In your plan book, you note all of the activities you are going to cover each day in each of your periods. Make sure to start on a new, blank page of the plan book for each unit. Then use your materials and ideas to create a focus for each day.
