Lesson Plans and a printable!

If you remember from last weeks to-do list post I started listing things that I needed to get accomplished before school starts back. This weekend I successfully completed one of them:

I was so excited to carve out a few hours of time on Saturday evening to sit down and 1. decide what I wanted out of my lesson plans and then 2. start designing them. 

Let's start with step 1.

What did I want to get out of my plans?

One thing that was crucial to have in my plans was a week at a glance option. One thing that I absolutely hated about my plans from last year was that I had each day written individually which didn't allow for a 'quick look' at all. 

My first step was to decide how I wanted my week at a glance to be laid out and what I need on it. 

I knew that I wanted to keep it pretty simple and only include the important information so I narrowed it down to these key elements:

5 rows for each subject:

*Daily Routines

*Language Arts

*Math

*Science

*Social Studies

and 5 columns, one for each day of the week.

Under each day of the week I included titles for things I will write in each day (ex: question of the day, number of the day, skills being taught, indicators, etc. 

Here is what complete week-at-a-glance lesson plan format:

and here they are individually:

(click on the image to view in a larger size)

so you can see I have adequate space for all of my needs.

In addition to this I also needed a separate plan for each subject. My school requires you to have any Higher Order Thinking questions, assessments, differentiations, etc included in your plans. In order to have space for all of these I came up with this format:

I created this for each of my subjects and it will allow me to open it up each day, type out my plans, and then just hit print.  

I am working on my lesson plan folder this week too so be anticipating that. 

Now for the goodies:

To kick off my first available printable I have decided to offer my weekly-at-a-glance template (without my name of course!) and my language arts plan template FREE! Just click the links below and they are yours!

Download the Week-At-A-Glance template here

and here

Download the Language Arts template here


What system do you use for your lesson plans? Do you use a daily or a weekly approach?