I am in the process of applying for a teaching position for the fall. I am a graduate of a certification program so I feel like I am struggling a little. I guess I just feel unprepared on how the start of the year will be. When new teachers start the year off, where do they get their lesson plans? I know veteran teachers reuse lesson plans from year to year because I've seen this happen constantly as my own kids have gone through school. However, at some point, they have to change those up and use something new. Do they look at the curriculum and then create lesson plans prior to the year beginning or is there some resource that they use to get lesson plans? I would appreciate your help with this. Thank you.
I wrote my own lesson plans entirely from scratch. I used my course scope and goals as my starting point, along with the district-adopted textbook (if there was one). If I didn't have practice materials, I created my own. Some content areas provide ready-made lessons.
It helps if you have a good partner teacher. I'm a second year teacher, and my partner wasn't so good my first year, so I had to come up with lessons mostly on my own. The great thing about the internet though, is that you can literally find almost anything you're looking for if you try. Don't stress too much about it right now. Save that for when you need to stress
I made my own program based on the curriculum and the upshot of that is you can incorporate elements or activities you enjoy teaching. It's a lot of work and yes you have to modify it as the curriculum changes but it gets easier with experience and you already have a starting point, you aren't starting from scratch every time. I don't like teaching someone else's program but that's just me. I feel that when I write a program I know how to teach it because I know the rationale why a particular activity or lesson is in the program. As for resources, don't feel like you must make it all from scratch. Get something from the net that's a good fit and personalise it for your students. Spend your time on other more important things.
It depends on what kind of person you are. When I worked as an intern, I had zero experience, but the teacher next door gave me each lesson day by day and I just copied what he did. When I got to my first real teaching job my cooperating teacher told me to just do my own thing, so I did, and I actually found that I enjoyed that more, even though it's a bit more stressful (but in some ways not). At my new school here, we're expected to do things in lock-step, and I'm not a fan of that. Use your textbook if you have one as a resource, check out teacherspayteachers, and do lots of Googling.
Same. I created my own lessons based off the curriculum map (which laid out what themes to cover and approximate number of days) and state standards. And like someone else had said, you can find a lesson plan for almost any topic on the internet and just adjust it to your own needs.
I make a year at a glance listing the objectives I want to teach each week. If I am teaching multiple subjects, I try to coordinate objectives if possible. Once I know what I'll be teaching and when I'll be teaching it, I make rough plans for my grading period. Each week, I make my detailed plans and tweak as needed. Unless your new district provides a scripted curriculum (barf!), you'll be creating your lessons by yourself or with a grade level team if you are self-contained elementary. And the real kicker- you may not be provided materials to use to plan with. I've never had everything I need to teach all my objectives. Some places had more materials than others, but I've always had to create or modify materials to use in my classroom. The good news is that finding materials is much easier than when I started in the 90s.