Lesson Plans and Resources for Teaching

There are countless ways to write up your lesson plans.  Some teachers and administrators like long, detailed lesson plans complete with an outline of information to be delivered.  Others like the short and sweet one week summary, with objectives, activities, and assignments. No matter what type of lesson plan you prefer, it will help make your life easier to have en electronic template (probably in MS Word or Excel) to begin with.  This way you can type up your lesson plans, save them to your computer, and avoid making countless copies of a blank template that you got from a co-worker four years ago. ... Read Full Story

This is a trick I learned in my college education courses.  Another one of my classmates thought it would be a cool idea to fake a memo on school letterhead and use it to convince students that an unpopular policy was taking effect. He told them that they were going to be charged 10 cents per page of copy paper… and that included any tests, quizzes, and assignments they did.  The point was to get them to witness in a personal way the onerous nature of taxes in colonial times. I took the technique a step further and realized that you can create you ... Read Full Story

I've been looking at loads of sites that have canned lesson plans. Most plans are pretty static and boring. I've found some really great ones though. I love the science and math lessons that I can use with my 3-6 graders that I get in the computer lab. The one thing I don't like about most of the lesson sites is that I need to take their lessons, save them, then modify them for my uses in another format. I just don't have the extra time for those steps. I recently came across the beta site called teachershare.scholastic.com where you can search for lessons, ... Read Full Story

What's a wikizine?  It's an e-zine where the readers are writers too! This wikizine is focused on collaboration among educators.  It's a place to share lesson plans, lesson ideas, and resources.  If you've got something interesting, feel free to add your article and share! The true direction of this wikizine is up to those who read it, but I'd suggest sending general education articles to other zines (such as Issues in Education), and only posting stuff here that is pertinent as a resource.  This could be a review of a book or a website, an idea for a lesson, or a project you developed.  If ... Read Full Story

There is a lot to be done in the first few days of school.  Contact information needs to be collected, schedules need to be ironed out, and procedures need to be learned.  It’s common to spend a few days on non-sequitor “back to school” lessons before diving into the “real” curriculum. I developed this particular lesson plan for the second or third day back at school.  I used it in a US I course, but it could be easily adapted to US II or World History.  The driving concept behind the lesson is that students don’t like the idea of memorizing lots of dates, but ... Read Full Story