LESSON PLANNING MADE EASY WITH GOOGLE TEMPLATES

The 2020-2021 school year was my second year of teaching and my first as a Head Teacher. Trying to navigate the world of head teaching PreK is enough of a challenge on its own but doing so in the middle of a global pandemic presented a unique set of challenges I hope to never experience again. I am not ashamed to admit I felt very overwhelmed and unprepared to handle to challenges that came with running my own classroom. One of the biggest challenges I faced was learning how to put together meaningful and impactful lesson plans.

Although I got off to a rough start, I learned a few things along the way. I’ve always been good at assessing my work situations and creating processes, procedures, and templates to meet my needs. I was able to do the same this school year. Two of my templates that helped me to become more efficient at lesson planning was my Monthly Lesson Planning Calendar and my Daily Lesson Lesson Plan template. In this blog I will talk about how I got organized this school year using these two templates and share a link for you to access them for your own use!

MONTHLY LESSON PLANNING TEMPLATE: GOOGLE SHEETS

I began creating my monthly lesson planning calendar around December and never looked back. One of the main challenges I faced prior to creating the calendar was bringing together themes and lessons across subjects in a meaningful way that flowed. When I started the school year, my lessons were a little all over the place and they didn’t flow in a way that made sense. Science thematic units didn’t flow with language arts units and that didn’t flow with math units. Seeing all of my lessons in one place really helped me to tie in thematic units across subjects. Here is a picture of what my monthly calendar looked like at the end of the school year.

The focus of the monthly calendar was to allow me to look at lesson plans across all subjects in a glance. I am able to work in lessons that fit with a particular theme around the same time, factor in holiday and special lessons, and move things around in a way that helped me to see the overall picture of what we are studying at any given time. I also share the calendar with my entire teaching team which allows us all to see and make changes accordingly. Lastly I am able to link special documents into the calendar for easy access. Utilizing my daily lesson plan template with the monthly planning calendar was the ultimate tag team.

DAILY LESSON PLAN TEMPLATE: GOOGLE DOCS

Utilizing a daily lesson plan template allowed me to dive more in depth on planning out each lesson. Once I have all the lessons entered into the monthly calendar, I can do through day by day and plan out each lesson for the day more in depth. Using the daily lesson plan template allowed me to spell out the lesson objectives, list any materials needed, and add a description of the lesson. I used this document as a guide to send to parents of any students learning remotely. This allowed parents to be able to see what their student needed in advance of the lesson so students can be prepared, and gave them an idea of what the activity looks like in case they needed to step in and assist their students with anything. Here is an example of a lesson from the end of the school year. Creating this template in Google Docs allowed me to share it with my teaching team and also allowed me to copy the link and paste it into the monthly calendar for easy access.

Thanks for checking out this blog post. If you have any lesson planning templates that you find helpful, please let me know in the comments below. You can grab your copy of my Google Drive Lesson Planning Templates by clicking on the link below.