Remember how excited everyone was about the new school year during the first week of school and then week 2 came along and reality set in? Let’s not lose that enthusiasm.
These 5 lesson plans are engaging for student and teacher and help keep the momentum going. Of course, you can use these lesson plans any time during the school year. After all, it’s good to have enthusiastic students (and teachers) regardless of the month.
5 Start of the School Year Lesson Plans
Searching for definitions in a dictionary does not utilize higher level thinking. Context clues challenge does.
- Context Clues Challenge Lesson Plan. I created this one after being lectured on needing to align my lessons to the standards, so I picked a standard on context clues and came up with this. I use it once or twice a quarter to introduce short stories or novel chapters. There’s a little preparation involved, primarily finding which words to include and where they’re located in the reading material.
- Paragraph Challenge. Remember the last time you asked the class to share what they had just written? Crickets, anyone? The paragraph challenge should take care of that problem. This is a good way to highlight positive qualities of writing.
- The Greatest Creative Writing Assignment Ever!!!! I was skeptical, too. But this really is the greatest creative writing assignment ever. This one is perfect for week 1. It’ll give you a break and a baseline for student writing. You could even combine this with the aforementioned paragraph challenge.
- Review the Basics Note Card Lesson Plan. Let’s be honest: Nobody wants to review the parts of speech or literary terms or whatever basic knowledge your students should possess…until now. This requires the making of flash/index cards in advance. I recommend putting a student aide to work making them.
- Reading Challenge. Let’s end this like we started it, with a challenge. This turns the read the selection and answer the questions boring assignment on its ear. This incorporates the two unsolved mysteries of teaching: (1) Why kids engage in far more intelligent discussion when I’m not involved (other than to keep them on task); (2) Why simply adding an element of competition makes students work 5 x harder even if there’s no prize.
