Tips for Writing Activity/Lesson Plans

Start With the Big Picture

Start by looking at your long-term goals. What do your students need to have learned by the end of the course?

Divide these goals by the number of weeks you have with your students
Arrange them in the order you think makes the most sense (easiest to hardest, for most subjects)
Aim to complete however many you need to complete each week in order to cover them all during the course.

For example, let’s say you are teaching a beginning level ESL course for adults, and you have ten weeks to teach the following:

Alphabet
Shapes
Colors
Cardinal and ordinal numbers
Days of the week
Months of the year
Telling time
U.S. currency
Classroom vocabulary
Around-the-house vocabulary
Around-town vocabulary
Parts of the body
Describing yourself
Clothing
Shopping for food
Common ailments and their remedies
Common household problems and their solutions
Prepositions of place and time
Present simple verbs
Present continuous verbs

Using the course organization method described, you would have to teach two topics per week in order to cover them all in your ten-week course. In this case, you can have a lot of overlap. Around-the-house vocabulary, for example, can be taught in tandem with prepositions of place (The sheets are on the bed, the lamp is on the table, the table is in the living room, etc.). Or you can teach U.S. currency along with shopping for food.

So, the next thing you have to do is pick a topic and break it down further into teachable chunks that we’ll call objectives.

Class Objectives

In each class session, you should have at least one or two objectives. In a math class, your objectives might be for students to be able to solve simple equations or to work word problems using multiplication.

In an elementary music class, you might want them to be able to distinguish fast tempo from slow.
In a first grade science lesson, one objective could be for students to identify and differentiate between solids and liquids.

Let’s go back to our beginning ESL class, though, and talk about the unit on parts of the body. This is a beginning class, remember, so it’s not necessary to teach all of the internal organs, just the basics. Your unit objectives are going to be things like:

Students will be able to read and pronounce the names of body parts in English.
Students will be able to point to body parts when they hear the names of them in English.
Students will be able to identify body parts both orally and in writing.

Presentation, Practice, Production

With these three objectives in mind, you can now come up with activities to achieve them. For every objective, you should have three kinds of activities or parts of your lesson plan:

Presentation - The first part of your lesson plan is presentation. You, the teacher, present new material to your students.
Practice - In the second part, practice, your students work on guided practice activities to build their understanding of the concept and their confidence in doing it.
Production - In the production portion of the lesson, students should be able to do what the objective set out for them without any assistance.

To get ESL students to read and pronounce the names of body parts correctly in English:

The teacher would present each word by showing it written down and modeling the pronunciation.
In the practice portion of the lesson, the students would listen and repeat each word, with the teacher listening and correcting where necessary.
In the production phase of the objective, the students would read the words aloud either individually or as a part of a story.

Provide Activities About the Lesson

By the time you’ve thought about how you want to present, practice and produce, you’ve already come up with your lesson activities, but just in case you’re still stuck, here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

Worksheets/book work (It’s not really creative, but it gets the job done.)
Word games (word searches, crossword puzzles, word scrambles, and hangman-type games)
Songs (sing-along, listen and fill-in-the-blanks, listen for incorrect words)
Games
Group conversation
Pair work (dictation, problem solving)
Problem-solving (jigsaw activities, decision-making, logic)
Anything that lets your students get their hands on the real thing
Projects to take the lesson beyond the classroom and into the real world

Gather Materials

The last thing you need to think about is the kinds of materials you’ll need for each activity. These can range from books and charts to paper and markers to song lyrics, CD players, game boards, dice and cards.

Charting the Steps for Writing Plans

If you are more of a visual learner, consider the flow chart above which reinforces the steps for writing activity/lesson plans. Start with your objective, then choose your activities for presentation, practice and production, and finally, make a list of all the materials you will need for each activity to meet each objective.

This should streamline your planning process and maybe make it just as fun as the teaching itself.