Tips for Improving Your Elementary Lesson Plan

If you are teaching an elementary school class, you need to tailor your math lessons to accommodate the various learning levels of students in your class. You can find whole books and web sites on lesson planning. This article offers you a few takeaways that you can implement immediately in your lesson plans.

The first suggestion concerns finding unique approaches to important lessons. A good teacher does not just follow the curriculum guide and the textbook sequence. A good teacher tries to establish a lesson that will capture the students' attention and hold it while they learn the skills necessary to achieve the state standards. Great teachers often look for new ways to teach the same old lessons by inventing their own innovative ideas, getting ideas from fellow teachers, and finding great lesson plans on the Internet.

The second suggestion concerns planning your activities for each lesson using scaffolding. This approach has been written about extensively in the education literature. But what does it mean? You need to tap into your students' existing knowledge, extend it so that it relates to new knowledge, and keep building in this way. Students should always be able to see the connections between what they already know, what they are learning, and what they are going to learn.

The third suggestion is a little bit more difficult. The changing composition of American classrooms requires teachers to find materials that reflect the diversity of the American population. Whether you teach elementary math, science, reading, or another course, find sources for students to read and examples for them to hear that represent different viewpoints, races, ethnicities, languages, and other diversities. Consider this example. How many books do you read that have a person in a wheelchair as the main character? If your textbook doesn't have any stories about people with disabilities, maybe you should look for a story that does.

It may take a while at first to get used to integrating diverse sources into the way you teach, but you can increase your capacity in this area over time. A good classroom teacher can eventually use this approach without even thinking about it, but it takes practice.

To be a great teacher, make a consistent effort to improve your lesson planning skills. For more assistance, search for lesson plans on the Internet. One place to start is the web site for the National Education Association.