Lesson Plan Template

A lesson plan is a sheet a teacher writes for themselves and shows to someone else, and it has to serve both: a page you can glance at mid-lesson, and a page an observer can read in a minute. Most templates are a form with twenty boxes, half of them empty. This one is the parts of the lesson with their minutes, which is what a lesson is, with the objective and the materials above and the homework and the notes below.

The page reads top to bottom. The subject in small type, the topic under it, then the teacher and the class, with the date at the right. Objective and materials side by side, each a short paragraph. Then the parts: warm-up, instruction, practice, wrap-up, or whatever your lesson is, each with its minutes and one line of what happens, and the minutes added up at the foot so a fifty-minute lesson is fifty minutes on paper before it is fifty minutes in the room.

The parts are a list, up to eight. Type the minutes and the total is worked out; you cannot type the total by hand, which is how plans stop lying about their length. A homework line at the foot, and a ruled box for notes after the lesson, on a switch, for the thing that did not work and the thing that did.

Every line has a limit and the customizer holds you to it, so a topic never runs into the date and a part's description never runs off the row. Six color themes, and light ink for the plan printed five times a day.

Print it at 100%, not fit to page, on plain copier paper, and keep the filled-in ones; a term of them is the best record of a class there is. The free version is this design with the sample lesson, in the Ledger theme, on Letter, with a small credit line at the foot. The paid version carries your class, your parts and your words, all six themes, and comes back in Letter and A4 from one purchase, with a link that works for a year.