Lesson Planning Supplies

Raise your hand if your new years resolution had something to do with making sure your lesson plans get done sooner – this was always me. I felt like I knew what I wanted to do the upcoming week, but actually sitting down and planning it all out was the one task that got pushed off all week.  Then, when I did get time to put my lesson plans together I would find that I really didn’t have enough ideas, or all of my ideas needed a ton of prep work – prep work that I didn’t have time for.

I’m here to give you a couple of suggestions so that you can be more successful than I always was!

First you’ll need to gather some supplies.  I always had a pen and a notebook ready for writing down my lesson plan ideas.  I like the notebook because I could write down an idea for Mother’s Day in January and when it came time to plan for it in May that note would still be there – no losing Post-it’s!

If you are looking for a teacher planner that will help you keep everything organized, the Editable Teacher Planner from A Modern Teacher has always been my favorite.

It also helps to keep a copy of your standards or your assessment objectives close.  These help when you are struggling to come up with an activity for certain domains.  They offer inspiration and help focus your planning.

The beginning of a new year can also be a great time to refresh your lesson plan template. If yours isn’t working for you, check out these freebies for some inspiration! Speaking of inspiration, I always find it helpful to look at what others are planning when I’m feeling a little stuck. If you need some creative new ideas, my lesson plan for the first week of preschool might be a great place to start!

My last tip is to use your tech resources.  Take pictures of ideas that you want to remember and save them in a specific folder.  Keep a running list of ideas in your phone or on your tablet.  I love Pinterest for lesson planning. I set up different pin boards for each learning domain and it made it really easy to find the activities that I was looking for.  You can check out my Pinboards for inspiration and if you need a little help getting them organized, check out this post.

The idea is to constantly be recording ideas so that when you sit down to plan you have more than enough to complete your plans.