Lesson Planning Tip: Plan Alternative Activities

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!

~Robert Burns

You don’t have to be an English teacher to relate to Robert Burns’ “tim’rous beastie” in his poem To a Mouse. Though you’re not likely to have a farmer come and knock your house down, it’s a sure bet that someone or something will ruin even your best-laid lesson plan at some point during the school year. Whether you’re in your first year of teaching or your twenty-first, no course on how to prepare a lesson plan can ever cover every potential pitfall in your day.

What can go wrong? Plenty. Fire drills, unannounced assemblies and particularly bad student behavior can all make it difficult to complete your full lesson in your allotted time period. With today’s packed schedules that provide barely enough time for students to eat lunch or go to the bathroom, keeping them for a few extra minutes may be impossible.

When Lessons Run Too Long

Solving the problem of an over-long lesson usually isn’t too difficult in theory: You’ll just have to add an extra day to your unit.

In practice, though, this isn’t always so easy. You almost never need a whole extra class period to cover the material you didn’t get to, and now you have a chunk of time to fill before getting back on track with your next full lesson the following day. What should you do with the extra time?

On the surface, extra time sounds like a dream, since we almost never have enough time to do all the great activities we’d like to with our students. But these bonus bits of time are highly unpredictable, so it’s not always possible to use them the way you would in your dreamiest of dream plans.

What you need is a backup plan.

The Beauty of Bonus Lessons and Activities

One of the easiest ways to fill in unexpected downtime in your classroom is to create a bank of bonus activities for your students. These should focus on practicing skills rather than on introducing new information. Ideally, they will be general enough to slip into any unit, any time for maximum flexibility. It’s also motivating for your students if these bonus activities are fun:

• Sustained Silent Reading: You can assign an interesting article or allow students to choose their own books to read.
• The Big Question: Propose an interesting question that’s open for debate in your subject. These can be anything from serious ethical questions to fun hypotheticals like “Which mathematician would you rather bring home for supper?” — anything related to the subject at hand will work. You can open the floor to student discussion or ask them to write their thoughts down.
• Review Games: It’s easiest to choose one game format (Jeopardy, Around the World, Hangman or other great games) and stick with it for the year so you don’t waste time explaining new rules. All you need to do in the moment is use questions related to your current unit to keep the game relevant.
• Test Prep: This one’s not all that fun, but if your students are facing a standardized test in your subject, bonus test prep worksheets can be a useful way to sneak in some extra practice.

Adding Flexibility to Your Daily Lesson Plans

If you’re a newer teacher still figuring out exactly how long your activities take to complete, or if you’re an experienced teacher working with a new curriculum guide for the first time, creating a lesson plan that provides daily flexibility is also a good idea. Try creating a customized lesson plan template that includes both “must do” and “may do” activities. The “must do” activities are the meat of your lesson, but the “may do” items can be extra practice, enrichment activities or a thought-provoking extension of the concept you just taught. To keep yourself from going crazy, keep these simple: no extra photocopies that might go to waste, and no extra grading that you’ll collect to add to your workload. The “may do” activities are the perfect time to let your students take the lead to apply the skills and ideas they just learned.

Taking Your Lessons to the Next Level

When most other professions are taking a rest, teachers are busy preparing for the week ahead. ~Louise Rogers, TSL Education CEO

In a recent study, 78 percent of UK teachers said they spent every Sunday afternoon prepping for the coming week, and 70 percent have pulled an all-nighter to get the job done. Another study found that teachers and professors do more overtime than any other profession: about 12 extra unpaid hours per week.

At Planbook Plus, we know just how hard you work to make great lesson plans, and we want to make it a little easier to keep everything organized. Our online lesson plan book allows you to customize your plans with those bonus activities and “may do” items, and we make it a breeze to see how changes fit into your over-arching scope and sequence for the year. Try Planbook Plus for free, and get some of your precious time back for yourself.