Teaching in a kindergarten can be immensely rewarding but can also take a lot out of you. You can spend one day going over your material with all the children listening to you like they’re pocket recorders. On other days, you may find yourself doing your best Eddie Murphy impression from Daddy Day Care.
Many think teaching kindergarteners is as easy as walking in with a smile and a coloring book, but it takes a lot of planning if you want to keep your classes organized. That’s easier said than done as kindergarten lesson plans can be a pain to create—but that’s one headache you can do without.
We’ll show you how you can get your hands on well-made, ready-to-use lesson plans for kindergarten in no time.
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Get the Best Kindergarten Lesson Plans in a Second
If you’re in a hurry, you can go through our top picks of kindergarten lesson plans. Teach Simple has hundreds of lesson plans for kindergarten in its database, including the following selection:
What To Focus on in Your Kindergarten Lessons
Teaching kindergarten students is a unique experience—they require a different approach than any other student group you’ll work with during the course of your career. While they’ve spent their pre-K years playing their days away, kindergarten poses new challenges and requires them to learn how to learn. No one has a more tasking job in that process than the teacher. It is your responsibility to both entertain them and show them that learning can be fun if done the right way.
As a kindergarten teacher, you shouldn’t overdo it with something that can be complicated for a five-year-old. Instead, you should focus on activities and outcomes that will get them prepared for elementary school.
Some of the essential routines to teach in kindergarten include:
- How to respond to a teacher’s question
- What to do if you’re feeling sick
- How to spot the teacher’s signals for silence or attention
- How to line up in a hallway
- How to clean up materials
- What classroom jobs there are and how to do them
- How to work in a group
- How to sit at a desk
- What to do when you enter a classroom
- How to enter the classroom when late
Since kindergarten kids care more about hand-washing than any of the above, you must ensure your lessons are as fun and engaging as possible to get your students to learn what you’ve set out to teach them. That’s why it’s important to come armed with a comprehensive lesson plan that will let you achieve this goal.
How To Look for Kindergarten Lesson Plans Online
When you look for lesson plans for kindergarten on the internet, you’ll come across thousands of search results that offer different lesson plans you can download for free or for a fee.
Going through each page and checking out every lesson plan to see if it aligns with your curriculum, standards, and teaching style is a no-go—especially if you need to prepare a lesson with only a few hours to spare.
It’s bad enough you have to spend hundreds of dollars on teaching materials from your own pocket every school year. You might have even tried to snatch a free lesson plan or a template online, but the problem is the same as always—you get what you pay for. Most free kindergarten lesson plans are not worth your time and are mediocre at best. When you download one, you’ll need to make so many changes to it you’re better off writing one on your own. The majority of these materials:
- Lack a clear lesson plan objective
- Don’t contain a list of all the necessary materials and precise assessment methods
- Don’t foster flow in the classroom and have no defined timelines
- Don’t follow curriculums and standards
- Don’t offer diverse activities adapted to different learning abilities of kindergarteners
- Are hard to incorporate into your weekly or monthly instruction plans
Paid Lesson Plans for Kindergarten
As a teacher, you’ve likely experienced how uninspiring and stale a lesson can be if you only use a textbook and don’t bring any fun to your classroom. That’s why teachers shell out thousands of dollars each year on additional teacher materials, including lesson plans.
A paid lesson plan can bring you the quality you need. The issue is that most lesson plans are hidden behind a paywall, and you only get a small glimpse into what you are purchasing. You don’t really know what you’re going to get until you pay up. Even if it’s a high-quality plan, it may not go in line with your curriculum, and it can contain certain parts and activities that you know your children won’t enjoy.
Most websites offer only a snippet and charge per download, and you can throw hundreds of dollars down the drain on lesson plans that are not a good fit for your classes. Since there are countless lesson plans you can browse on those marketplaces, it can end up draining a lot of your time and money.
The solution to this problem is to find a reliable source of teaching materials that won’t get the last dollar off your credit card by charging you for every download.
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Spend Less, Get More—Use Teach Simple
Teach Simple is a one-stop shop for all your teaching needs that you’ll fall in love with at first sight. Everything we publish is created for teachers by teachers. You won’t have to worry about paying for a resource that’s clearly been made by someone who’s never stepped foot in a kindergarten classroom.
Whenever we receive a new submission, other teachers review it to ensure it’s a high-quality teaching material that aligns with all the necessary standards.
Unlike most other sources, Teach Simple doesn’t charge per download. Instead, we offer a subscription-based payment option where you pay a low monthly fee and get access to every material we have on offer—and we offer thousands of new materials each month.
Once you register for Teach Simple, you can use our database to download:
- Lesson plans for various subjects (e.g., foreign languages, graphic arts, music, social studies, and life studies)
- Ebooks
- Graphics
- Games
- Flash cards
- Projects
- Worksheets
You can sign up for Teach Simple for free using our 30-day trial. Regardless of whether you’re on a trial or a paying subscriber, you’ll be able to make unlimited downloads of all of our materials. This way, you’ll also help support your fellow teachers as Teach Simple gives 50% of its revenue to its contributors.
Teaching Beyond Kindergarten
Teach Simple doesn’t focus solely on kindergarten students. If teaching kindergarteners is only one part of your job or you intend to move to a different grade, don’t worry—Teach Simple’s got you covered.
Aside from various kindergarten subjects, we also offer lesson plans for ESL students, as well as plans for different grades, such as:
- Lesson plans for preschool
- 1st grade lesson plans
- 2nd grade lesson plans
- Middle school lesson plans
- High school lesson plans
We also focus on students of all needs and learning abilities. You’ll be able to find materials dedicated to students with speech therapy and special education needs.
You’ve Downloaded a Lesson Plan—What Now?
When you find a lesson plan that’s to your liking, you’re almost ready to face your students. The last step is to make slight adjustments to the lesson plan to fit your students’ needs. Nobody knows your classroom as you do, and you can’t expect an online material to factor in the fact that little Billy has attention problems, while Anne isn’t interested in anything that’s not presented through a cartoon.
Since you’re teaching five-year-olds, you should focus more on activities that will help you keep the students focused and willing to learn what you have to show them. They may miss how to read “half past four” on an analog clock, and that’s fine—they’ll learn that in 1st grade. Your focus should be on getting them used to the idea of learning.
Some of the activities you can use to engage your students and make your lesson plans more fun are:
- Create a scratch art picture of winter
- Learn about Piet Mondrian and use his coloring style
- Create a collage
- Go on a shape scavenger hunt
- Make a map with places like home, park, and school
- Decorate an Easter egg or organize an Easter egg hunt
- Describe or draw your family
- Write a poem
- Create a Mother’s Day card
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Get Ready for Your Lesson in an Instant With Teach Simple
You can leave behind you the days of sweating over an empty sheet of paper and throwing money away at subpar lesson plans. What you need to make your lessons top-notch is a high-quality lesson plan and various other resources that will help you achieve the objective of your lesson. You can find all of that on Teach Simple.
All you need to do is sign up and start downloading the materials that will ensure your kindergarten classes are fun, engaging, and instructive.
