Lesson plans

Going into education one type of document that I will have to write quite frequently are weekly lesson plans. Lesson plans are just a basic layout of what is going to be taught during the week, and they are usually required to be done a week’s time, to turn into the schools administration, or for emergencies incase substitute teachers are needed. I have plenty of practice writing lesson plans while at HCC in classes such as math for elementary teachers, art and music for elementary teachers. We not only had to write lessons plans, we had certain formats that had to be followed, and then at the end of semester had to teach the class based off of the lesson plans we as students had wrote.

One that I enjoyed the most was in music for elementary teachers. We had to choose a subject; I picked weather (mainly rain). We also had to choose a grade level to teach at, I selected lower elementary K-4, and since that is what my degree is going into. When we were writing the lesson plans we used the Bloom’s Taxonomy Levels of learning. Which here is a good website with the levels listed http://www.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm.

And with using these levels we fit them into each of the categories of the lesson plans. While we were writing the plans we had to take into account the age of our audience and what their level of learning was. Example being you wouldn’t be teaching kindergarteners physics and 7^th graders shapes. We had to be on the audience’s level, which at times is harder than you think. You had to write the lesson plans with the intent to teach them a brand new subject or add on to prior knowledge.  Your purpose of writing lesson plans are to just give you a type of guided path for the week, it also helps when the teacher is out sick, you don’t freak out the substitute teachers. Lesson plans help you stay on track with the child’s education. You are the teacher, so your purpose is to teach whatever the subject is, like weather, in the easiest way possible, while also including activities for the children to do.

Your language has to be simple and easy to understand. Your tone must be calm and sweet, teaching and yelling at the same time aren’t a good way to teach a child. Your relationship with your class must come across as that, you, the teacher know what you are teaching, because believe or not they can smell fear. Ha-ha.

To me lesson plans aren’t that hard of a thing to do; it’s just tedious is all. It takes a lot of time, planning, and subject selection. But if you are taught how to do them easily from the beginning it’s just smooth sailing from then on.