A weekly planning session will set you up for success and help you set reasonable goals for yourself. Use this weekly planner template to reduce your stress

I personally believe the key to having a productive week is having a plan. Here I will share my plan for setting myself up for success.

A weekly skeleton is basically a foundation for how your weeks are structured. It’s like a blueprint for your weeks. It’s so you don’t have to start from scratch every single week when you sit down for your weekly prep meeting to plan the next week.

Advancing your Yoga Self-practice: how to make a routine, add spirituality and pranayama, find new inspiration, stay motivated, and tracking your progress

How I use Notion plan every week to a "T," and get things done. Includes a FREE Notion weekly planner template so you can get productive too!

When it comes to planning your goals for the new year, it's important to have a good strategy in place. I like to organize my time into 12-week "years," a concept I learned from the book The 12 Week Year by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington. Learn why and how I do this, including a visual

This meal plan is what I followed during the seventh week of the elimination diet using The Inflammation Spectrum book by Dr. Will Cole.

It’s not what you start that counts; it’s what you finish. But more importantly, finishing the work that matters most helps us thrive. Start Finishing presents a 9-step method for going from an idea that matters to a completed project. It takes a root-cause approach, for too much of the productivity literature works on surface-level tips that help us become better to-do list ninjas while our soul-deep dreams and goals remain eternally out of reach.

FREE 8 week bikini body guide by Kayla ItsinesThis 8 week plan cost me £50 so make the most of this while it lasts!!

Learn all about Dr. Fuhrman's aggressive weight loss protocol from his wildly-popular book "Eat to Live!" Get a free daily checklist to help transition!

Looking to sculpt your physique and boost your fitness level? This weekly gym workout plan is designed for women of all fitness levels, helping you build strength, improve endurance, and achieve your fitness goals. Remember, consistency is key, so aim for 3-4 gym sessions per week with rest days in between for recovery.

I put together weekly plans for the tech lab for grades K-5. These plans include everything you need so that the planning is done for you.

For week 36 of the 52 Planners in 52 Weeks Challenge, I used the Momentum Planner. It’s not a planner a lot of people seem to talk about but if you’re working on a big project and reall…

Want to eat less meat while increasing plant-based foods? Use this flexitarian seven-day meal plan, created by a dietitian, with recipes to help you get started.

Have trouble getting it up, but don't want to get viagra? Don't worry, have these foods instead, and you'll have nothing to worry about.

This daily home workout will help you burn calories while working your calves, quads, chest, triceps, biceps, lower abs. Get fit fast.

I am linking up with DeeDee and sharing a peek at my week... and year. It's been a little chaotic around here lately, so I created a weekl...

Be the best version of you with this beginner weekly workout! This day-by-day plan has simple moves that will help you tone muscle, and improve endurance.

Sample meal plan with recipes and shopping list for 12 week carb cycling meal plan, plus tips for success in sticking to your diet.

You can’t snap your fingers and make it Friday at 5 PM, but you can adjust your Sunday routine.

Let's be real, planning weekly lessons in the ESL classroom can be an overwhelming task. Factors include caseloads and the sheer number of students/small groups serviced. Also, heterogenous groupings with a variety of language levels make it difficult to target specific language needs of students. Perhaps you're a new teacher and simply haven't had the guidance yet on planning ESL lessons. Here are a few tips to help make planning less stressful. ESL instruction is often vague because, in most cases, there's no curriculum to follow or even to guide. We are left to our own devices to plan and provide lessons for our students that build language skills in the four language domains of listening, reading, speaking and writing. That alone can make planning overwhelming. Tie in grade level content and setting language goals, and it's a LOT to consider! Let's start with a few pre-planning tips. These will support successful lesson planning. PRE-PLANNING TIPS 1- Lesson Planner Book It's really important to have a place to keep all things planning in one place. I don't know where I'd be without my lesson plan book. Things I keep in my planner in addition to lesson plans are: 1- Student lists with ELP levels broken down by each domain, 2- The curriculum my students are learning in their gen ed classrooms so that I can integrate my ELD lessons with the grade level content whenever possible, 3- A calendar to keep me on track with events that impact my instructional schedule, such as meetings and testing, 4- Language goals and data collection to track student progress. There are some really awesome print and go planners, as well as digital planners out there. Find one that suits your needs AND brings you joy. :) 2- Know Your Students One of our main goals is to take students from their current language proficiency level to the next level. Knowing students and their needs is critical to planning appropriate lessons. Students have an English Language Proficiency (ELP) level, but what does that mean exactly? So, my student has an ELP level 3, but what can she do in each language domain? I won't know what to teach her if I don't know the starting point for her. Look at the breakdown of all 4 language domains and identify the weaker domains for each student. Keep this information in your plan book, or somewhere easily accessible. This is valuable information, but it's a very small piece of data. More importantly, I need to know what my students can do right now. Their latest scores might be 6 months old, so I want to also gather current data. Assessments I give at the beginning to determine starting points: phonemic awareness (newcomers) phonics writing (give a prompt that students have plenty of background knowledge) reading I need to know what level of reading I can expect from students, not just with decoding, but more importantly comprehending. For writing, if my student is a newcomer with little to no English, I want to see a sample of their writing in their native language. This will give a lot of information about the literacy skills new students bring to the table. Once I know what my students CAN DO, I can then plan targeted ELD lessons to meet their language and literacy needs. Without this information, I'd be trying to hit a target in the dark, and that's not servicing the students or myself. 3- Student Placement in Small Groups Each small group, in my opinion, should be homogeneous. I group students according to needs, not necessarily by ELP level, although generally it works out that most level 3 students, for example, have similar needs, but not always. Grouping students with similar needs is key to targeting the skills they need to move from one level to the next. OK, I've got my plan book, my student data and my small groups identified by need. Now what? Tips to Make Lesson Planning Less Stressful 1- Consistent Weekly Activities Incorporate consistent activities that target your students' needs, preferably that don't require planning time, and add them in your plan book every week. For example, I go through my plan book and add "phonics" to certain days for certain groups each week, so that's one less thing I need to plan. I have all the phonics materials on hand, so I simple print out and copy what I need and go. I also do an Idiom of the Week activity and a "Friday Focus on Grammar" for other groups. Those automatically go into my lesson plan book each week as well! Several of my groups have a warm-up activity when they first come into my room. The activity takes about 5-10 minutes, but that's another chunk of time I don't need to plan. My level 1s and 2s have an irregular sight word booklet, and my level 3s and 4s have a Restate the Question writing prompt. Irregular Sight Words - Warm Up Activity Finding consistent and meaningful weekly activities to add to your plan book cuts down on planning time. Other examples of weekly activities: -Grammar lessons (so many possibilities- What do YOUR students need?) -Vocabulary - multiple meaning words, synonyms/antonyms, shades of meaning words, content vocabulary, affixes, thematic monthly vocabulary, etc. -Idiom of the Week -Word Work - Affixes is a great focus area! -Read Alouds -Let's Talk! -oral language activities (purposeful oral language development is so important) One of my favorite "Let's Talk!" activities is projecting a picture and having students talk about what they see happening. It could be content related or simply an interesting photograph. An awesome resource for this is Chuck Dillon's website. He's such a fantastic illustrator! Each picture has tons of action, which means there's never a shortage of things to talk about. Pick a couple of "Weekly Activities" and plug them into your plan book each week. Here's a blog post that shares "3 Weekly Activities that Do Not Require Planning." 2 - "Go-To" Activities These are helpful to have on hand whenever you feel unsure about what to plan next, or you just need a meaningful "filler" lesson. We all need those from time to time. These lessons are still high-quality lessons that target the needs of our students, but they don't require planning time. Some Go-To Activity Examples: PWIM with any picture (picture word inductive model) Inferring using pictures 5 Ws and H using pictures Mind Maps Language Games This Build a Sentence activity uses the PWIM strategy to generate words about a picture. In this activity, we use the words to generate sentences of varying lengths. And on this particular day, I also challenged my students to use position words in their sentences. To start, I ask students to tell me something they see in the picture. The students generate the words and I write them on the board in different colors depending on the part of speech. Students also generate the sentences, and I support with grammar, as needed. It's a great activity to have on hand, as it covers many skills and is easily adaptable. They are "one and done" lesson activities that are meaningful AND build language skills. Having a variety of these resources to pull from definitely makes planning less stressful because I know I have language building lessons that I can plug in whenever needed. 3- Language Function or Thematic Units If you know me at all, you know I LOVE planning and teaching language function units. This truly makes my planning less overwhelming. MOST, if not all, of my students across multiple grade levels work on building language around the same language function, so when I plan, I have one LF in mind for everyone. Whoo-hoo! For example, when I teach the language of Compare and Contrast, I focus on that language with all of my groups. I don't have 10 different groups doing 10 different things; they are ALL learning the language of Compare/Contrast, which makes planning SO much more manageable! Some groups might need more focus on expressive language skills while others need more practice with receptive language skills, but I know that the overarching focus for all is the language of Compare/Contrast. Plus, often times I can reuse lessons with multiple groups. Halleluiah! And by tweaking lessons with some additional scaffolds, I can use them with even more groups. This is a huge time saver! Language Function: Compare/Contrast Language Function: Fact/Opinion Each language function unit lasts about 4 weeks; and once it's planned out, there's not a lot of additional planning that needs to be done during that time period. I don't start a new unit until all my groups are finished, so while I'm finishing up the unit with some groups, I use "filler" lessons with the groups that are already done. To learn more about incorporating language function units in the ESL classroom, check out the blog post links below. 4- Reusing lessons is honestly my #1 tip for making planning more manageable and less stressful. And maybe you can't use an entire lesson with multiple groups, but you can use a portion of the lesson. How many groups can I use this lesson with? How can I tweak this lesson so that I can use it with more groups? Those are questions I ask myself as I plan. RECAP: 1- Incorporate Consistent Weekly Activities (phonics, grammar, vocabulary) and plug them into your plan book each week. 2- Go-To Activities (have a variety of meaningful filler activities on hand) 3- Language Function Units (all groups learning the same Language Function) 4- Reuse Lessons with multiple groups! As I mentioned earlier, sometimes the overwhelming feeling of planning comes from the sheer number of students and groups serviced. Or it could be that our numbers are low, but we service 6-12 grade levels. Many ESL teachers travel between schools. There's a variety of reasons that can make planning stressful. Regardless of the reasons, having these tools in your teacher toolbox can help make planning less stressful. Linked below are some of the blog posts and instructional resources mentioned in this post. Teaching Language Functions with English Learners Language Forms and Functions in the ESL Classroom

No time for creativity in your classroom? Build a set of creative, hands-on lesson ideas that can fit into any curriculum in 1 hour or less.

Planning is a task all teachers must do. You either love it or you hate it, and I LOVE it! I love it because my planning documents are purposeful. I refer to them and use them constantly throughout the term. No one wants to waste their time writing up planning documents only to file them away, nev

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How is school already around the corner? Summer has seriously flown by. I love having the kids at home, having no type of schedule and hanging out at the water park all week. However, I'm ready for a little more consistency in our life. I think my kids are ready for it as well. I

Are you searching for an illustrative math blog to inspire you? Tunstall's Teaching’s blog tidbits are inspiring for teaching math & young learners! Learn more!

Find out how to stop spending too much with this 52-week saving money challenge: choose how much to save with these free printables!

Whether your lesson plans are detailed multi-page documents submitted to your administration each week, or they’re mostly post-it notes with concise bullet points, effective lesson planning requires strategy and intent. Great lessons need clear direction, purpose, pacing, and solid pedagogy. (Side note: If you are looking for engaging step-by-step lesson plans for the ELA classroom – especially for sub plans – check out my ELA Lessons Bundle with over 60 individual plans). While planning such successful, well-balanced, dynamic lessons takes time (think of all those observation lessons), if you get into a strong habit of working through a few key steps, it simplifies the whole process. And, as with all habits: the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Soon you internalise the steps and find yourself doing them without even realising it. Below are the four simple steps - G.A.D.E - I go through in my mind every time I plan a lesson. Do I always write them out in detail? Nope, but I still always work through them as I plan. What do you want students to be able to do, know, or understand by the end of the lesson? The most effective way to plan a route for a journey, is to start with knowing where you are trying to get to, right? Instruction is most effective when you, and your students, have a firm idea of the goal. When they know what they are working towards, the lesson is far more purposeful. Your goal should be able to be expressed in a single sentence or two: the more focused it is, the easier it is for students to digest and understand. I even suggest writing this on the board at the start of the lesson, for students to be able to see and reference. Examples of Goals: - Students will understand the impact of varying sentence patterns, in term of creating tone. - Having read chapter 5 of The Great Gatsby, students will be able to explain how an author develops a character in a narrative through the use of indirect characterization. - Students will be able to effectively back up their thoughts and ideas with appropriate textual evidence. [Grab a free lesson plan template here] How are you going to break down the substance of the lesson, to help students reach the goal? This is the nuts and bolts of the lesson: the lecture, activities, exercises, etc. Ask yourself: What are the most effective methods to help guide students to the goal: A lecture? A group discussion? A reading exercise? Worksheet practice? A video? A writing exercise? Station work? The key here is breaking the lesson down into varied, manageable chunks: rarely should you plan a 60 minute lesson with just one single activity. You want to think about dividing the class up into 10-20 minute segments with varied activities and modes of learning: all geared towards the overall goal. [Check out Room213's helpful blog post on how to build in time for productive struggle when lesson planning.] Examples of Segments for a 60 minute lesson: 5 min: Provocation - some sort of hook for the lesson to pre-test knowledge, or incite intrigue and interest. 10 min: Paired work 15 min: Teacher-led lecture and discussion 20 min: Individual work to practice a skill 10 min: Reflection and assessment of learning How will you, and your students, know if they have achieved the goal? This does not always have to be a large assessment task: that would perhaps be a unit goal. However, you should be able to place small milestones in every lesson to assess whether or not students are gaining knowledge, or developing their skills, and this need to be intentional. It may be a summative assessment task, but in the daily lesson it would likely be formative assessment. This should be a conscious decision when planning the lesson. Examples of Opportunities for Demonstrations of Learning: - Ask strategic questions: “How do you know that? Why did you write that?” - Use exit slips - Have students produce something which requires them to use what they have learned - Anonymous class polls or quizzes (or Kahoots!) - Self-reflections or evaluations - Written work / Projects What do you physically need to do, to facilitate the learning? Once you know the purpose of the lesson, and have a firm understanding of the activities and elements of the lesson, think about what you need to do to prepare. While this might be gathering resources, photocopying, finding passages, etc., it also should be about the space of the classroom: how best to facilitate the most effective lesson for your purpose. Think about desk layout, visual displays, seating arrangements, etc. Example of Environmental Elements - Move the desks into groups / pairs / individual etc. - Print, layout and organize materials - Have a specific song playing which relates to the lesson, for when students enter. - Create spaces around the room for station work or gallery walks etc. FREE TEMPLATES: If you are looking for a template for lesson planning: Click here to access a FREE editable Google Docs template (just go to “File” and “Make a Copy” to save the document to your own drive for editing). Want a printable copy? Click here to access a printable lesson plan template. Do also check out: If you are looking at planning a whole unit of study, read this great post by The Daring English Teacher.

Take some time on the weekend to prepare for a productive week ahead and hit the ground running on Monday morning

4 weeks to fitter & stronger

Learn how I created my ultimate Notion recipe database for effortless meal planning and cooking. Plus, discover the best templates.

This post shares my intermittent fasting results after 5 months. I have also provided a sample weekly 16/8 meal plan for beginners.

Atkins meal plans are the low carb way to lose wieght. Here's what you need to know to about eating Atkins for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert!

Have you ever tried keeping someone else’s home routines and failed? There are lots of reasons that can happen, from a difference in situations (what

Let’s teach about the reflection and refraction of light for 5th grade. Even though this can be a confusing topic, your students will reach mastery in no time with these interactive activities for reflection and refraction, as well as absorption. What are reflection and refraction? I’ll be honest; before I started teaching 5th grade, the ... Read more

I have made a name for myself on my corner of the internet sharing candida diet recipes, best practices, and tips that I've learned...

A lovely reader sent me this floor plan last week after I mentioned it’s getting harder and harder to find different plans. I feel like I’ve seen them all. I am so glad this one came through so I can share it with you all. It’s a beauty… The plan…

Are you planning to visit Australia? Do you need to put together a perfect Australia road trip travel itinerary? Here is our guide with suggestions of must-visit places, top places, best things to do, tips on where to stay and how to get around.

Curriculum maps give your pacing for the year ensuring standards mastery. This post walks through curriculum mapping with a video tutorial on using Excel.

Curriculum mapping is an essential skill for educators. Curriculum Mapping ensures a teacher teaches all the standards for the grade level by mapping out what…

Relax tight muscles and ease joint restrictions with this 4-week mobility training plan. Each week involves four stretches for your hips, back, neck, shoulders and wrist.