Lesson Planning

Since a number of my readers are teachers or former teachers I thought you all might be interested in how I do my lesson planning. I pretty much start off every time with panic. I'm convinced that I can't think of anything new to do with my students and that every class will be a disaster of me standing there staring blankly down at the students. It's about this time when I begin to troll around various websites looking for ideas. My favorite by far is Dave's ESL Cafe which must have 500 different little activities and games. I look at these for a while essentially rejecting every one I see. Then I pull up my lesson plan from the last week and look over it. I start by cannibalizing things that I didn't use in the previous week and adding them to either the schedule for next week or the list of back up activities I keep in case something I had planned works really poorly. I then think if there are any activities that had been on the back up list that I want to promote and use first in class next week. Finally, I begin to figure out ways to essentially change around things I saw on the internet until they'll work in my classes. For example there was one idea of assigning all the students to be celebrities and talk to one another only they wouldn't know who they were and would have to ask questions to find out. I didn't really want to do this event since I think they would all just speak to each other in Chinese and I would have chaos on my hands. What I ended up deciding to do is to write the name of a famous person on a piece of paper and have one student come up and hold it to his foreheads. He'll then ask the class questions about who he is until he figures it out. This doesn't get as many people talking all at once but it keeps things more organized plus it makes them practice speaking to a group which they're sorely lacking at. Once I come up with about four activities I organize them all and print it out. I also keep last weeks lesson plan with me so I can remember exactly what I did for each class.