Teacher's Guide to Creating Your Own Lesson Plan

Lesson plans are a wonderful way to teach a home schooled child or a whole classroom of children. You are able to focus on a single subject for a period of time of your choosing and use various methods in teaching that subject that will both interest and inspire the child.

But how does one create a lesson plan? Are you thinking that this is too large an undertaking for just you? Lesson plans are simple to devise with a little time and creativity. The look on your student's face will he or she actually 'gets it' will be worth it!

To begin your lesson plan you obviously need to know what subject and grade that you are teaching. Whether it is a lesson plan about dividends or the Ice Age, having an outline is always an excellent way to begin.

You need to start with understandable and defined objectives for your lesson plan. List what you want the child or children to learn and write descriptions of what will be in your lesson plan. For instance, if your lesson plan was about air pollution, then decide what part of air pollution you would like to cover.

Also list what materials will be needed for your lesson plan. This can anything from the equipment used, the number of pages copied or even what pages in their book that will be utilized for the lesson plan.

Then decide how you will introduce the subject matter. Will you give a presentation such as a slide show or short video, use an object or experiment to introduce the subject matter or have them open their book to a certain chapter? Remember, that your introduction will make or break your lesson. Catch their attention in the beginning and you will most likely have your student or students glued to their seats awaiting what will happen next.

An example of this is:

Title: Air Pollution and How Does It Affect You?

Materials: Pens or Pencils, journal, vocabulary words (given by teacher) about air pollution

Plan: Take kids for nature walk with journals. Ask them why we would walk instead of taking a car.

Have the kids draw trees that they see on their nature walk and how pollution would affect these trees.

Announce that the next unit will be on air pollution.

Show the students a slide show of different types of air pollution

Discuss the vocabulary words and how air pollution affects people and the environment.

Have students bring in current event articles that concern what is happening due to air pollution.

You may want to include group projects, games, films or even a field trip as part of your lesson plan. The methods you use to teach your lesson plan depend on your students. Determine whether your students are more visual learners that might bore easily when having to read from a textbook or more of an audio-type learner that could listen to a lecture without shifting in their seats. A successful lesson plan will depend on how your students will accept what you are teaching. The more hands-on the lesson is, the more engrossed the children will become with the subject matter.

Now you must decide how the student or students will use the information that you are teaching them. Are you going to give them a written test? Or maybe a group project or even separate projects that they can finish on their own? Once you have decided, and then write down step-by-step instructions on how this will take place.

Then write an end-of-lesson-plan review. This may include any homework or assessments that you will be giving the students. If you are home schooling one child, then you might want to assign a lone project that he or she can do after 'class' and have a date when to turn it in. If you are teaching a special needs child, then you may need to make accommodations such as having he/she research on the internet about a certain type of pollution (with your help) or aiding them in a project such as showing how pollution affects certain environments.

Finally, check on all that you have written for your lesson plan. Make certain that you have your materials, assessments, projects and tests all arranged. Before introducing your plan to the class, be sure that you have all the books needed, field trips planned and papers copied.

Some good rules to follow while designing your lesson plan is not to spend too much time buried in a textbook. The best lesson plans are those that involve more hands-on experiments, projects and field trips. In other words, something that is different than their everyday class work.

Also, over plan a lesson as much as possible. It is easier to cut back on a lesson plan than it is to fill in what is missing.

Lesson plans can be as long or as short as you like. My lesson plan on the Revolutionary War lasted 5 months! While my lesson plan on the Bill of Rights lasted two. It all depends on if the students are excited and are learning from the lesson or not. Needless to say, the Revolutionary War was a lot more interesting than the Bill of Rights!

The whole purposes of lesson plans are to catch your student's imagination and interest. If you are still uncertain that you can create your own lesson plan, check out other teacher's lesson plans on the internet such as www.edhelper.com or www.lessonplanet.com to get an idea of what yours should look like. Then start being creative!