Five Week Lesson Plan: Fill & Download for Free

It depends on what you mean by “wing it.”If you mean “have absolutely zero idea what to do once the class begins,” that’s only happened to me a few times, all of which were emergencies. I had to cover for another teacher who couldn’t take a class for whatever reason, and I walked into the class with zero plans. Fortunately for me, as an English teacher, I can always pull out old faithful in those situations: creative writing.My favorite go-to creative writing prompt is to show the class a picture, and ask them to make that the end of their story. What leads up to the picture is up to them. Ten minutes of writing and twenty minutes of sharing… and just like that, I’ve killed a half hour of class time.If by “winging it” you mean “have really vague lesson plans… sometimes just a few words…” then the answer is “several times per week.” For example, my lesson plan for one class tomorrow is simply “discuss section 14.” That’s it. The whole lesson plan for a 30-minute class. But I get away with such vague plans because:I’ve done this before. This is where experience REALLY helps.I know exactly what “section 14” is. It’s a 25-page section in a novel that we’re reading that the students were supposed to read over the weekend.I know that I have chatty students who love discussing this novel with me.I just read that section today (I’ve read it in previous years when I taught this same novel, though), and I marked several discussion points on the pages in question.So tomorrow’s class will likely go something like this:Me: On page 142, why do you think the author spent so much time describing the landscape?Students: [Five minutes of talking about possible reasons why…].Me: You all bring up some valid points. How about page 144, when the main character starts to cry? Am I supposed to feel bad for this character? Or did they kind of deserve it?Students: [Five minutes of trying to convince me how I should feel about this character…].And so on. I have to rope some stragglers into the conversation, or prod the conversation along sometimes, but most of my job just involves getting the students to think about something they otherwise would have just glanced over.I also have the added benefit of having not one, not two, but three different online learning programs that my students use. They’re all really useful, and some days that’s all we do… the online programs… but other days, I use them as “filler.” I put stuff on them for students to do when they’re done with other work. If my “winging it” discussions fall short, because the students aren’t as chatty as I’d anticipated, I just quickly put some work on one of those programs for them.It wasn’t always this way. My first year as a teacher, I had page-long, detailed lesson plans for every single class I taught. I’d spend 2–3 hours per day just planning for the 5–6 hours of teaching I did every day.But over the years, thanks to experience and the realization that a lot of that planning time was wasted fretting over details that no one really paid attention to anyway, I narrowed them down quite a bit. Now, my lessons plans for an entire week… six classes per day, five days per week… so 30 total lesson plans… fit on two pages, total. They’re mostly page numbers or short descriptions/reminders of things I want to cover that day.

It really depends on what your bosses want, and how experienced you are.I have been fortunate that my bosses have given me a lot of leeway and freedom to teach. I’ve had my lesson plans checked twice in the decade I’ve been teaching, and each time they told me that they were “fine.” That’s it. That’s the sum of the feedback I’ve gotten from my lesson plans during my teaching career.When I first began teaching, I did page-long lesson plans for each lesson I taught. I taught seven classes per day, but three of those were duplicates (same grade, same class, same lesson, just a different group of students).I realized pretty quickly that such detailed lesson plans were a waste of time.Nowadays, my plans are just page numbers from the texts and bullet-pointed reminders of what I wanted to cover. I’ve taught the same material so many times that I know what to do… I can anticipate where the students will get confused, what they’ll pick up quickly, what questions they’ll ask, etc…I teach five classes each day now, and my weekly plans for all five classes fit easily on two pages. I usually do my plans for the week on Sunday night, and I plan my Monday through Wednesday classes. I highlight the plans as they’re completed, so I know what got done and what didn’t, and, on Wednesday afternoon, I make my plans for Thursday and Friday, based on how things went for the first three days of the week.Today, for example, I’d planned on covering two things with my sixth graders, but they had a harder time with the first thing than I expected. I had to pull out some back-up resources for that concept. I only highlighted the half of the lesson that I was able to finish with the students today, so I know that tomorrow’s class will have to begin with the other half of today’s class.Flexibility is key. If you get easily upset when plans change, teaching might not be a good option for you.

It's Friday night. My partner says “sorry we can't go out tonight I need to finish this marking”“do it tomorrow”“I can't, I have lesson plans to do tomorrow".It's Saturday. She has spent several hours putting together the lesson plan. I've been sustaining her with cups of tea, the occasional biscuit and a bit of lunch which she ate sat at her laptop surrounded by books. “I've designed this activity, do you think it is more fun this way or this way”…“I don't know they both seem fine”“well I want to keep them engaged and give them something fun too”. It's now Saturday evening and she takes a break for dinner. “look at what I’ve got so far, I'm not sure if it is interesting enough though, I've broken it up into several activities and the homework I think fits in perfectly can we rehearse some of it?” “sure”. “can you proof read this please? Oh and just check this as well”. “ok but it's getting late you need a break"It's Sunday morning and she's up before me. “I don't want them to get bored, this is important”. “make sure you take a break. What do you want for dinner?” Finally she stops working. We go out to the shops or something and watch tv in the evening.Monday. Everyone goes to work. Monday evening. Everyone comes home from work. She walks in. Visibly upset. “you ok, you're late, what happened?”. She explains…occasional voice wobbling….Everyone seated. “miss i hate this lesson". One kid starts acting up in first 2 minutes of the lesson. 4 others didn't have their books and 3 others had no pen/pencil. Five minutes wasted sorting out the loud student. Friends of first students start acting up as well. “this is stupid why are we learning this”. Activity cancelled because need to hit the key plenary targets/learning objectives at the very least for this lesson otherwise she gets pulled up on performance. Trying to make up time as 20 minutes now wasted already. Students won't settle. Forced to remove one student and then another. Forced to give detention (thus having to stay late herself to supervise said detention at no extra pay). “now here is your homework”. 3 students don't have their diaries/planners. “miss, my dad says I don't have to do homework”. More disruption. Class finishes. Day ruined.Friday night, Saturday and half of Sunday spent trying to put together a lesson that hopefully will be enjoyable as well as educational and above all useful to her students rather than doing boring book work or just copying off the board or reading in silence, all ruined within 60 seconds by a class that last week was totally fine and that she was looking forward to all week but for some reason today decided to be total shits. And that was period 1. Rest of the day ruined. And this was a teacher who at the time had 6 years experience. Waste of a lesson and waste of a weekend.I put the kettle on and she gets to work on her next lesson.Sigh.