Each student will create a lesson plan for his/her area of interest (i.e., primary, elementary, secondary, etc.) between kindergarten and grade 12, in a chosen content area, using https://planbook.com. The lesson is to last approximately 60 minutes. Lessons must include the following elements:  title, grade level, materials, Common Core or Maryland standard (depending on the content area), objective, anticipatory set/warm-up, instructional input, guided practice, independent practice, closure, and assessment. Make sure your lesson plan aligns. Does your assessment test what it is setting out to assess – which are your objectives? Your lesson plan is to be written for a forty-five minute class.

Effective teachers employ a number of instructional strategies in their classrooms. These strategies are prescriptive approaches to teaching, designed to help students acquire a deep understanding of specific forms of knowledge.  Direct Instruction, Constructivism, Discovery Learning, and Cooperative Learning strategies are discussed in our textbook and it is expected that one of these strategies will be detailed in the instructional input portion of your lesson. You will need to do some additional research on the strategy you choose to showcase before writing your procedure, as the lesson must align with the strategy.

When writing your lesson provide a lot of detail. The goal is that you could hand your lesson plan to a substitute and have it taught exactly as you envision it. Also, it is very important that you integrate activities that engage all the learning styles in your classroom. Therefore, I will be looking for activities that engage the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. You can include children’s books, reference books, pictures, web resources, any poems, songs, learning centers or games, manipulates, and/or motivational theme related ideas.

Title/Grade: The title of lesson and the grade level that the plan is designed to teach.

Subject: discipline being taught

Materials: items/supplies needed to implement the lesson.

Consider:

• What items and supplies will be needed by both the instructor and the students in order to accomplish the stated learning objectives?
• What equipment will I need in order to utilize as many learning modalities as possible? (visual, audio, tactile, kinesthetic, etc.)
• How can I use materials creatively? What can I borrow from other teachers?

Common Core/Maryland Standard: Define what students should understand and be able to accomplish. Common Core standards focus on reading, writing, language, and math skills, while all other content areas are MD standards.

Objective: Precise goals for what you want your students to be able to accomplish after the lesson is completed. These must align with common core and/or state standards. SWBAT (Students will be able to…) is the acronym that we use when stating an objective. For the lessons in this unit, you will be focusing on only one objective per lesson.

Anticipatory Set: What would be said and/or presented to your students before the direct instruction of the lesson begins.

Purpose of Anticipatory Set

• Provide continuity from previous lessons, if applicable
• Allude to familiar concepts and vocabulary as a reminder and refresher
• Tell the students briefly what the lesson will be about- this is not the actual lesson
• Gauge the students’ level of collective background knowledge of the subject to help inform your instruction
• Activate the students’ existing knowledge base
• Whet the class’s appetite for the subject at hand
• Briefly expose the students to the lesson’s objectives and how you will get them to the end result

Instructional Input: (What knowledge will you communicate to the student–tell, lecture, stand up and deliver so that the student will understand the objective.) This portion of the lesson is the main part if the instruction and where you will include information about the instructional strategy that the lesson focuses on. Use your textbook and research on your own to explain the use of this strategy. How will new information be disseminated and what activities are employed to achieve the stated objectives?

Guided Practice: Precise goals for what you want your students to be able to accomplish after the lesson is completed. These must align with common core and/or state standards. SWBAT (Students will be able to…) is the acronym that we use when stating an objective. For the lessons in this unit, you will be focusing on only one objective per lesson.

Examples of Guided Practice in Your Lesson Plan

• Students will split into pairs to work together on drawing.
• On a piece of paper, students will draw a picture of plants, incorporating characteristics they learned about in this lesson (listed on board).
• On the other side of the paper, students will draw a picture of animals, incorporating characteristics they learned about in this lesson (listed on board).
• Students complete a book review that corresponds to what they are reading.

Independent Practice: Through Independent Practice, students have a chance to reinforce skills and synthesize their new knowledge by completing a task on their own and away from the teacher’s guidance. It is the part of the lesson where students are given the opportunity to practice what they have just learned.

In writing the Independence Practice section, consider the following questions:

• Based on observations during Guided Practice, what activities will students be able to complete on their own?
• How can I provide a new and different context in which the students can practice their new skills?
• How can I offer Independent Practice on a repeating schedule so that the learning is not forgotten?
• How can I integrate the learning objectives from this particular lesson into future projects?

Closure: The closure is the time when you wrap up a lesson plan and help students organize the information in a meaningful context in their minds.

Examples of Closure in a Lesson Plan

• Discuss new things that the students learned about plants and animals.
• Summarize the characteristics of plants and animals and how they compare and contrast.
• Ask what information from the lesson the students will find important three years from now and why.
• Ask the students to summarize the lesson to explain to someone who missed the class. Give them a couple of minutes and then either have them turn them in for you to read or have a few presented to the class.

Assessment: Standards and objectives must be assessed in every lesson and every child must have documentation to prove their performance as it relates to the mastery of that standard and objective. This can be done through many means, but a few ways to assess are quizzes, tests, independently performed worksheets, cooperative learning activities with independently scored rubrics, hands-on experiments with specific documentation, oral discussion in which anecdotal notes or another method of recording is used, question-and-answer sessions, or other concrete means.  Most importantly, ensure that the Assessment activity is directly and explicitly tied to the stated learning objective. In the learning objective section, you specified what students would accomplish and how well they would have to be able to perform a task in order to consider the lesson satisfactorily accomplished.