Planning… Love it or hate it, it’s a huge part of teaching.
If you haven’t been able to find a good planning routine, or if you’re struggling to make sure things are planned week to week (or even day to day), I’ve got a suggestion for you that completely changed the way I lesson plan, and helped me get time back.
Early in my teaching career, I STRUGGLED with planning and prepping. During my first year of teaching, those first couple of weeks of school were LONG and HARD. I was planning day by day and staying in my classroom until after dark to finish planning/prepping what I needed for the next day. That is an absolutely exhausting way to live. Slowly, I got faster and better at planning.
When I started implementing “batch” lesson planning strategies a few years ago, I remember feeling like I had happened upon magic fairy dust. Planning all of a sudden became SOO much easier, and I finally had a good rhythm and no longer felt like I was drowning.
If batch lesson planning is new to you, don’t worry, I’ll go over the basics with you so you too can gain your time back and lesson plan in a breeze.
What is batching?
If batching is brand new to you, you may be wondering what batching is. Batching is basically doing “like tasks” in bulk. Batching saves time because there are few transitions and your mind can focus on one simple thing, which often makes things flow more easily.
How does batching apply to lesson planning?
When it comes to lesson planning, I like to batch lesson plan by subject. Batching by subject is helpful because you can stick with one subject and plan out a month’s worth of lessons in a pretty quick amount of time. This is because you’re not switching between different concepts, and you’re solely focused on one subject. Planning this way also has helped me think more long-term and be more strategic or “thought-out” when lesson planning.
Lesson plan batching in action?
So you might be wondering how this actually works, so I’ll give you an example.
When you start out, you will have to do a bit more planning upfront, but it will go quicker after the first week.
During the first week, I plan the following items:
- Teaching procedures
- Get to know you activities
- Grammar – throughout the next 4 weeks
- Math – throughout the next 4 weeks
- Phonics
- Writing
During the second week, I plan the following items
- Grammar – (already planned)
- Math (already planned)
- Phonics – throughout the next 4 weeks
- Writing
- Social studies/science
During the third week, I plan the following items
- Grammar (already planned)
- Math (already planned)
- Phonics (already planned)
- Writing – throughout the next 4 weeks
- Social studies/science
During the fourth week, I plan the following items
- Grammar (already planned)
- Math (already planned)
- Phonics (already planned)
- Writing (already planned)
- Social studies/science – throughout the next 4 weeks
Once you get to this point, you only have to prep 1 (maybe 2) subjects a week. This significantly reduces the amount of time I spend lesson planning, which leaves me time to grade, prep, or any of the other million things on my to-do list.
I have created some templates to help with the batching process. If you’d like some help to get started with batch lesson planning or just need help keeping your lesson plans nice and organized, try the lesson planning templates I created. The following items are included in the lesson planner:
- weekly lesson planning templates
- curriculum mapping templates
- monthly checklist/goals etc.
- month at a glance
- year at a glance
- upcoming important dates
- batch lesson planning documents
- class schedule
- special class schedule
- 300+ digital stickers
Below is a close-up of the batch lesson planning templates included. There are a variety of templates included to help make lesson planning a breeze!
If you’d like a calendar, small group lesson planning, sub planning, and more, then you may be interested in the full planner bundle. You can check out the planner bundle below:
