Lesson Plan Maker

A lesson plan is half form and half timetable. The form part only has to be filled in. The timetable part has arithmetic in it, and that is the half that goes wrong. This article walks through every box on the page, explains what the warnings under the activity table are telling you, and follows one sixty-minute geography lesson from a blank form to a printed sheet with a reflection box on the bottom.

Why a lesson plan needs numbers in it

Most lesson plans are written in a word processor. They look tidy. They list a starter, some main activities and a plenary. And almost none of them say how long each part takes, because nobody sits there adding up minutes in a table that will not do it for them.

Then the lesson runs. The starter that was meant to take five minutes takes twelve, because settling a class always takes longer than you think. The main activity fills whatever is left. And the plenary, which is the bit where you find out whether any of it landed, never happens.

It is always the plenary. Not because teachers do not value it, but because it is last, and last is what gets cut. This tool puts a minutes box against every activity and adds them up against the length of the lesson. When the sequence does not fit, you find out at your desk on Sunday evening rather than at ten to the hour on Tuesday.

The header, and what each box is for

The first panel holds the facts about the lesson. Topic is what the lesson is about, and it becomes the heading on the printed sheet. Subject, Class or group and Teacher print in a strip underneath it. If you teach four classes the same lesson, the class name is the thing that stops you filing the wrong sheet.

Date has a format dropdown beside it. You can have day first, month first, a long written date, a short one, or the ISO form. The choice changes the printed plan and the exported text at the same moment. That matters more than it sounds: 05/09 means two different days depending on which side of the Atlantic your colleague is standing.

Starts at is optional. Leave it empty and the sequence shows offsets, so an activity might read plus twenty minutes. Fill it in and every row gets a real clock time instead, which is what you want on the sheet you glance at mid-lesson.

Lesson length is the number everything else is measured against. Set it before you start timing activities. Curriculum reference is a free text box for a spec point, a scheme of work code or a unit number, whatever your department actually uses.

Objectives and success criteria are not the same sentence

These two boxes sit side by side because people confuse them, and the confusion is worth clearing up.

A learning objective is what pupils will know or be able to do at the end. Name the four processes of coastal erosion is an objective. It describes something inside their heads.

A success criterion is the evidence. It is the thing you or they can look at and tick. I can list all four processes with my book shut is a criterion. So is simplifies twelve to eighteen down to two to three without a calculator. If a criterion is too vague for a twelve-year-old to check against their own work, it is too vague for you to mark against.

Write one per line in each box. Three objectives is plenty for an hour. Six is a scheme of work, not a lesson. The tool prints objectives as a numbered list and criteria as a bulleted one, so they never blur into each other on the page.

One test is useful here. If a line describes what pupils will do with their hands rather than what will be in their heads afterwards, it is an activity and it belongs in the sequence table further down. Make a poster is a task. Explain two causes of erosion is an objective.

Prior knowledge, vocabulary and resources

Prior knowledge is a short note about where the class actually is. The useful version says both halves: what they can already do, and what they will get wrong. They can label a river's upper course, and several of them will confuse erosion with weathering. That second clause is the one that changes how you teach the lesson.

Key vocabulary takes words separated by commas. They print as a strip of small boxes along the top of the plan, which gives you something to point at. Six words that must come back out of their mouths by the end beats twenty they will hear once and forget.

Resources is a plain list, one item per line. It prints as a single run of items separated by dots, so it does not eat a quarter of the page. Treat it as the pile you gather before the bell: photograph pack, mini whiteboards, textbook pages, the diagram you meant to print and did not.

Building the timed sequence

The sequence table is the heart of the page. Three buttons across the top add a starter, a main activity or a plenary. A starter drops in at the front of the list, a main activity goes in before any plenary, and a plenary goes on the end, so you are not clicking the up arrow five times to put things where they obviously belong.

Each row has four things you fill in. Phase is a dropdown: starter, main, plenary or other. What happens is a short description of what the class is doing. Led by takes a word or two, such as teacher led, pairs, independent or whole class. Mins is a plain number.

The left column is not something you type. It fills itself in. If you gave a start time it shows the clock time each activity starts and ends. If you did not, it shows minutes from the start of the lesson. Either way it recalculates the instant anything changes, including when you drag a row up or down with the arrows.

Keep the descriptions short. A row that reads sort the photograph cards by which process is doing most of the work is a prompt you can read in a glance. A row that runs to four lines is a paragraph you will not read at all.

What the warnings are telling you

Under the table sits a row of small chips and, when something is off, a warning line. The chips report the number of activities, the minutes you have planned, the length of the lesson, the spare time left, and the clock time the lesson ends if you gave a start.

Go over the length and the warning tells you by how many minutes and reminds you that whatever is last is what gets dropped. Fill the lesson to the very last minute and it nudges you to leave some slack, because the register, the latecomers and packing away are not free. Leave a very large gap and it says so too, in case the slack was accidental rather than deliberate.

Two more warnings watch the shape rather than the total. If there is no starter, it says the first two minutes decide how the other fifty go. If there is no plenary, it points out that without one you find out next lesson whether any of it landed. And if the objectives box is still empty, it says what the plan currently is: a description of a lesson rather than a plan for one.

None of these stop you. You can print an overrunning plan if you know exactly why it overruns. The point is that you saw it first.

Support and stretch on the same sheet

Differentiation notes have a habit of living in a separate document that nobody opens during the lesson. Here they sit on the same form and print on the same page as the sequence.

The Support box is for who needs what, and what you will do about it. Sentence stem on the board, word bank on the desk, pre-labelled diagram for the four on the support list. Names or initials are fine, and they never leave your machine.

The Stretch box is for the harder question. The best ones are not more work; they are a different question. Which process does the most damage here, and what in the photograph makes you say so? A pupil who finishes early gets something to think about rather than another ten sums.

Assessment and homework

How you will check they got it is a dropdown with the methods teachers actually use: questioning and cold call, mini-whiteboards, an exit ticket, marked written work, peer or self assessment against the criteria, a short quiz, observation of practical work, live marking. There is also a Something else option if your department has its own name for it.

The notes box next to it is for what you are listening for. Listening for abrasion used properly, not as a synonym for weathering is far more useful on a printed plan than the single word questioning.

Homework takes a short description and a due date, which uses the same date format you chose at the top. Leave it blank if there is none. An empty homework box simply does not print, so the sheet does not carry a heading with nothing under it.

The reflection box, and why it prints empty

At the bottom of the form are three boxes: what went well, what you would change, and what to pick up next lesson. They are meant to be filled in afterwards.

So the printed plan handles them differently from everything else. Leave them empty and the sheet prints ruled lines under each heading, sized to write two or three lines in. That is the version you carry into the room, with somewhere to scribble while the lesson is still fresh.

Type into them later and the same plan prints as a record instead, with your words in place of the lines. That is the version worth keeping in a subject file or an appraisal folder, because it says what actually happened rather than what you hoped would.

There is a checkbox to leave the reflection off the printed plan entirely, for the times when you just want the plan itself.

Saving plans and reusing one as a template

Give a plan a name and press Save this plan. It appears in a list underneath, labelled with its subject, class, date and number of activities so you can tell one from another months later. Saving again under the same name updates that plan rather than making a second copy.

Each saved plan has three buttons. Load brings it back exactly as it was. Delete removes it, after asking. Use as template is the interesting one.

Use as template keeps the shape and drops the content. Subject, class, teacher, lesson length, start time, differentiation notes, assessment method and resources all stay. So does the sequence, including the phases, the minutes and who leads each part, but the descriptions are emptied. What it clears is the date, the topic, the objectives, the success criteria, the homework and the reflection.

That split is deliberate. Most lessons in a scheme of work share a rhythm: six-minute recall starter, fifteen minutes modelling, a paired task, independent writing, a plenary. Rebuilding that rhythm every Sunday is wasted effort. What genuinely changes each week is what you are teaching, and leaving last week's objectives sitting in the box is exactly how a plan gets printed with the wrong learning on it.

A worked example: sixty minutes on coastal erosion

The page opens with a real example rather than a blank form, because editing something is faster than facing nothing. It is a Year 8 geography lesson on the four processes of coastal erosion, sixty minutes long.

Three objectives: name the four processes, explain how hydraulic action differs from abrasion, and use a photograph as evidence. Three matching criteria, each written so a pupil could tick it themselves.

The sequence has five rows. A six-minute whiteboard starter on last lesson's vocabulary. Fourteen minutes modelling the processes on a diagram the class annotates. Sixteen minutes sorting photograph cards in pairs. Ten minutes writing a paragraph independently. An eight-minute plenary where three paragraphs are read out and the class names the process.

That comes to fifty-four minutes in a sixty-minute lesson, so the spare chip reads six minutes and no warning appears. Push the starter to twelve minutes and the total hits sixty, the spare chip drops to zero and the warning about filling the lesson to the last minute appears straight away. Push it further and the warning changes to tell you how far past the end you have run.

Change the lesson length to forty minutes instead and the same sequence is fourteen minutes over. That is the number you would otherwise have discovered halfway through the paired task.

Printing it, and keeping it to one page

The preview on the right is the sheet. Press Print and your browser's print box opens, where you can pick a printer or choose Save as PDF to keep a file.

The layout is built to fit on one side of A4. Boxes sit in pairs where the content is short, the vocabulary prints as small chips rather than a list, and the resources run along a single line. The worked example above fills about nine tenths of the page, reflection lines included.

What pushes a plan onto a second sheet is long prose in the notes boxes. A plan is a prompt you glance at while thirty people are looking at you, not an essay. If yours is spilling over, the fix is almost always to cut sentences rather than to shrink the type.

There is also a checkbox called print empty boxes as ruled lines. Tick it, clear the form, and you get a proper blank pro forma with lined space under every heading. That is handy if you want to plan on paper, or if you want to hand a trainee a form to fill in by hand.

Exporting, and moving a plan between machines

Three buttons sit under Take it away. Copy as text puts the whole plan on your clipboard, ready to paste into an email or a shared document. Download .txt saves the same thing as a plain text file. Download .json saves a structured file that contains every field on the form.

The JSON file is the one that travels. Underneath the buttons is a file box that reads a JSON file back in. Export a plan on the laptop at home, email it to yourself, and load it on the classroom machine. Everything comes back, including the activity sequence and the timings.

The file is readable text, so you can open it in any editor and see what is in it. Nothing is hidden and nothing is compressed. If a field is missing or somebody has edited the file by hand, it loads what it can and fills the rest with sensible defaults rather than failing.

Mistakes that make a plan less useful

Writing activities in the objectives box is the commonest one. If your objectives all begin with words like make, draw or complete, they are tasks. Move them down to the sequence and write what the tasks are supposed to teach.

Planning to the last minute is the second. A sixty-minute lesson is not sixty minutes of teaching. Five minutes of slack is the difference between a plenary and an apology.

Vague success criteria are the third. Understand the topic cannot be ticked by anyone. Rewrite it as something you could point at in a book.

And leaving the homework due date blank is a small one with a long tail. The date prints in the format you chose, and a plan that says the date out loud is a plan you can hand to a cover teacher without a phone call.

Where your plans actually live

Everything on this page is worked out inside your browser. The plan you are editing and every plan you save are stored in this browser's own storage on this device. There is no account, no sign-in, and nothing is sent to a server at any point.

That matters more for a lesson plan than for most documents, because a differentiation note is a sentence about named children. Those sentences should not be sitting on somebody else's computer, and here they are not.

The trade is that your plans stay on the machine you wrote them on. Open the tool on a different computer and the saved list is empty. That is what the JSON export is for: it is the only way a plan moves, and you are the one who moves it.