Episode Summary
In this episode I discuss my approach to lesson planning as a kindergarten teacher. I highlight the significance of structured curriculum from the district, emphasizing the creation of a social-emotional curriculum to support fellow teachers. I share insights on balancing prescribed curriculum with personalized lesson planning, stressing adaptability to cater to students’ needs. Throughout, I offer practical advice for teachers, advocate for collaboration, work-life balance, and resourcefulness in teaching.
In this episode I share:
- Lesson Planning Strategies
- Unit Planning with Sticky Notes
- Utilizing Slideshows in Lessons
- Reflecting on Lesson Planning Process
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Read the Transcript
[0:00] Hey, teacher friends. Again, going off of last week’s episode where we talked about how to plan a kindergarten schedule, how to fit it all in, another question that you guys asked me to talk about on the podcast is how I plan my lessons. And I can see why. There’s lots of different ways to plan out your lessons, and it’s just nice to hear from other people how they do it. So I’m happy to share with you how I plan my lessons.
[0:27] Music. You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast, where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom-tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing your stress all while using effective and purposeful lessons that students love? Let’s get started.
[1:20] Something to know about my school demands and how we do things in my district, we are given units of curriculum for reading, writing, phonics, math, and then for science and social studies, we have lessons that have been created by the district that we are given. And all of this is laid out for us in a scope and sequence for the year. The only thing that we don’t really really uniformly have that’s given to us as social-emotional, which is why one summer I spent a lot of time creating my social-emotional curriculum, which is the curriculum that I sell on my website, Teachers to Be Teachers, along with the stories that I’ve created, like Filipe the Feeling Frog, the book, children’s book that you can get. I have more of those books written that I’m ready to just, it takes time to publish, but those are the lessons that I’ve created for my social emotional learning. So all that being said is I’m not in the same position of some of you where you literally have nothing and are given no curriculum and you’re staring at a blank screen or a blank plan book. That’s why I created all these things for other teachers, for Teachers by Teachers, for my website.
[2:37] That’s why I share all this because I have been given so much and I want to help others. That being said, over the years, my district has gotten more and more and more structured and scripted, and I’m having a hard time with that.
[2:53] Whereas before, I had some basic outlines and basic ideas, but I had a lot of free range. And so that’s where I’ve created all these things. I’ve used them all. And now my struggle is like fitting in the stuff that I’ve created that I know works and balancing it with what I’m given and what I’m supposed to be doing uniformly across the district. So that’s my own personal struggle. But I want you to know that the stuff I’ve created for you, like I have used, it’s come from a place of like me not knowing what to do and spending time thinking about it, creating it and looking for resources to balance out what I’m doing in the classroom, all that stuff. So if you are in a place where you’re given nothing, definitely look at this stuff. Every month, my goal this year is to send out to my email list or to have them on my website, like a scope and sequence kind of suggestion for the month of September, October, like have different monthly guides so that if you are someone who’s like, I’m not given anything, I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what kids should be learning at this time of year. You can have a good sense for what they should be learning that month and how you can go about it. So if you’re on my email list, you’ll you’ll get those. You can sign up on my website.
[4:08] Otherwise, stay tuned for those unit guides, for the month-by-month guides.
[4:13] Anyway, so I want to tell you how I plan my lessons. That’s what you asked for. You want to hear one teacher’s perspective of how I plan my lessons. Now, everyone does it differently. When I first started teaching, everyone on my team planned by the week. So on Friday, they’d be like, oh, I’ve got nothing planned next week. I’ve got to figure out what we’re doing. And they’d spend some time doing that. And then sometimes they’d come in Monday and be like, oh, I never planned. I got to figure that out. And like these were veteran teachers. And as someone who’s now taught a lot, this is my 11th year starting. I totally understand how they could do that.
[4:48] But as a brand new teacher, that did not work for me at all. And I was stressed trying to fit myself into their mold of lesson planning because that was what I knew. And it just did not work for me. So if you’re in that boat, that’s my caveat is like, I’m going to tell you the way I plan my lessons, but it might not work for you. You have to figure out the system that works for you. So for me, I like to have a really good sense of the whole unit that I’m teaching. Like I said, we’re given the curriculum. So I want to get a sense for what it is expected of me for the whole unit. What’s the end goal? Teaching with the end in mind. What do I want to make sure I get to? What are the big pieces? What’s kind of the story of the unit? What’s the arch? So I read through kind of the unit overview. I look through the lesson sequence and I map out the unit. Now, as I told you, we have a scope and sequence in my district, right? So we have by November 1st, we’re supposed to be moving on to unit two. Like that’s all mapped out for me. Now.
[5:54] It’s not an exact science. There are some times where I’m early. There are some times where I’m late. And it’s okay. For my district, it’s okay. I know there’s some charter schools out there and school districts where maybe someone’s coming around on a clipboard and saying, hmm, you should be on day 28 of your unit and you’re on day 27. What happened? And like that is mind boggling and unfair and not how it should be. That is not giving teachers the flexibility that we need to be responsive to the kids in front of us. If they need a redo of a lesson, if they need more time practicing something, if they’ve totally understood something and you can skip something like that professional dignity, that professional response should be given to teachers. We should have that flexibility to be our own professionals because we are professionals. But I digress. Anyway, so I’ll map out the whole unit on sticky notes in my paper plan book. Yes, I like a paper plan book. I just can’t switch over digitally yet. My teammates all do, and I see the benefit of it. I really do. But I just like having the paper. Maybe one of these days I’ll switch over. I don’t know. So, but so far it’s worked for me. I don’t really feel like changing it. So I put a sticky note in my plan book and I map out which days I am doing which lessons. And then I can see the whole unit progression.
[7:17] I can see if I’m on track or not on track with the scope and sequence, things like that. And I get a good sense of like, well, these lessons are very similar. So if they’re, you know, if I’ve taught this unit before many times, then I can say, well, I’m going to combine these lessons because that’s just what makes sense for my class. I like to leave in some wiggle room, but that’s why I like the sticky notes because I’m not erasing and rewriting everything because I switched a lesson around. Like I just have to move the sticky notes. And again, I do see the benefit of digital planning because you just cut and paste, right? But that’s what works for me. And because I’ve done it so long now, I have old plan books where I just move the sticky notes. I don’t have to rewrite the sticky notes every year.
[7:58] If it’s the same unit, same curriculum, I just move the sticky notes from one place to another. After I do that, then I know I can sort of take it chunk by chunk. I could take it day by day because I’ve seen how the unit is going. Like I like to have that end in sight. I like to have the unit plan in mind, but then I can take it day by day. When it’s a new curriculum, especially, it’s a lot of work to figure out what you’re teaching and how you’re teaching it. And so I don’t like to do more than one at a time.
[8:30] So I have the whole unit planned out. so I can then look at each day what I’m teaching that day. So the way I do that, if it’s a new curriculum, is I read the lesson over in detail. I highlight the important things that I need to remember, but I’ll put on a sticky note the really, really nitty-gritty, remember this part, this is your teaching point, these are the materials you’ll need, that kind of stuff. And I do that because when the kids are in front of you and you’re sitting down to do the lesson, and you have your book in your lap because it’s new to you. You don’t know what you’re doing yet. You don’t want to be reading it word for word. You want to have those bold points highlighted and you want to have the sticky note so you remember these are the most important parts. And then you have that from year to year. The other thing that you might want to do, it’s harder if it’s your first year teaching. I get that. It’s harder if it’s your first year teaching a new curriculum. I get that. You want to think about are there changes that you want to make to the lesson that make more sense based on your teaching style and the kids in front of you.
[9:36] Again, different districts, different schools have different opinions on this. Like I said, some schools don’t have lessons at all. Some schools will walk in and say you’re not on day 28. What happened? So I get that. But I think, as I mentioned, we are professionals and we should be given the courtesy to be reflective of the kids in front of us and flexible. And so thankfully, I have that in my district where I read over the lesson and I think, okay, this is the teaching point. This is the main thing that the kids need to understand. Is there a way that I want to change this up to better meet the needs of the students in front of me? And I’ll write down those ideas too, especially if it’s my first year doing it, being like, hey, this worked really well, I’ll do it this way. So I remember for next year, lots of sticky notes or in a pencil in the book too. Like, you know, instead of doing it for 10 minutes, it actually took 20 minutes. So maybe don’t do the second activity, things like that.
[10:34] Those will be very helpful later on. So then I’m kind of living out of my curriculum books for the lesson, but I’m not reading it word for word. I can just look at the highlighted part, the sticky note part. And by the time I’ve done the lesson more than once, like more than one year, I really don’t need to look at the book at all. I’m looking at it just to jog my memory. Or I will have created slideshows for the lessons, and then I can use that to just jog my memory instead of look opening the curriculum book again. Because again, the most important thing I think is that you’re getting to the teaching point of the lesson, not the how, but that you are getting to that teaching point. The how should be reflective of the kids in front of you, your teaching style, all of that. I like to have slideshows for most of my lessons because it helps keep me on track of the pacing of the lesson. There’s usually a lot of materials the unit wants you to get. And so you can have those in one place on the screen for the kids to see. You don’t have to be flipping through a bunch of pages and finding things and like scrambling to get things ready. It’s all there. So it takes time to set that up. And that’s where I’ll use my planning time if it’s a new curriculum and I’ll do a unit at a time or I’ll do a week at a time, depending on how like labor intensive it is. But once you’ve done it once, you have it every year.
[11:59] And so those become very valuable to me. But so that’s an important part for
[12:03] me on the planning process. Now, we have a new math curriculum. They have slides that they’ve created. This year, I did not feel like making my own slides. They have slides. They’re not great. I don’t really like them. But they serve the purpose of helping me move the lesson along, keep on track. If there’s a material that I need to get, sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not. But it just wasn’t worth my time this year while I’m trying to figure out this whole new curriculum.
[12:32] To also do the slides. That was, I was just not going to take that on. Work smarter, not harder. Work-life balance. There’s just not enough time in the day. So that’s something that I might do later on. For other parts of my day, for reading and writing, I made slides years three, four, five. I don’t even know. So do what works for you. If it helps you, do it. If it doesn’t help you, don’t do it or maybe try it after you’ve done that curriculum for a year or two all that stuff now there were times where like in math before we got this new curriculum I was told okay we had like everyday math beforehand do this everyday math lesson on specifically because they had like tons of different parts to their lessons that were all like unrelated so like specifically do this everyday math part on what an addition symbol is. And I would take that teaching point and I would find a better way to teach it.
[13:31] Because I didn’t like the way they did it. They didn’t like the way they did it. They just cared that I was teaching that teaching point. So I have absolutely taught from being like, here’s the standard, go teach it. Or like, here’s the little teaching point, go teach it how you see fit. I thrive under that. That works better for me. I’m I’m having, like I said, I’m having a hard time with the scripted stuff and making it my own. But if that were me, on my little sticky note, when I play in book, I write like addition, symbol, plus sign. And then when it comes to the day and I’m like, oh, I have to teach them what the addition symbol is. How am I going to do that? In the past, I looked on Pinterest for ideas. Addition symbol activity. That’s how I found the book that I love to use now. If I were a plus sign, ask other teachers on my team, What do you do for this lesson? How do you teach it? Things like that. If you’re looking for ready-made activities that you can grab and go, I’ve made everything that I’ve used in my class, I’ve made for teachers by teachers. Do that so that you don’t have to start from scratch. I really feel bad for brand new teachers who are in schools that have nothing for them. Like that’s a lot for you to figure out. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I want to help. So if you’re in that boat, let me know what you’re looking for and I probably have something that can help you. So send me a DM anytime.
[14:52] That is how I plan lessons. I hope it helped you to just see how another teacher does it. I like to look at the unit as a whole, break it down lesson by lesson, and then that way the day of I can just go and look at the lesson much more closely and highlight what I want to remember right on a sticky note the really important parts and materials I need and think about how if there’s a way that I want to change it to make it work for me in my class in front of me. If you have a different way to plan your lessons, let me know. I’d love to hear it. So our quote of the day is a six-year-old girl asked me, who drove you to school? And I said, me. And she said, but you’re not a parent. You’re not old enough. You’re only in kindergarten. You’re still a baby. So sometimes all this work is daunting. All this lesson planning, figuring all this stuff out is a lot. But just remember, you’re still a baby. You’re only in kindergarten. If only life would be so much easier. But yeah, hope you liked that episode and the lesson on learning how I plan my lessons. And we’ll talk to you in the next episode for the 50th episode of the podcast. I really can’t believe it. I can’t. But I’m so glad that we’re I’m doing this project. I’m doing the podcast. I’m glad that I started it. Anyway, we’ll talk in the next episode.
[16:14] Music.
[16:20] Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources, or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies. If you liked this episode, the best ways to show your support are to subscribe, leave a review or send it to a friend i’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips see you then.