5-Steps to Create Effective Literacy Lesson Plans For Your Classroom

An effective lesson planning process has the potential to transform your year.

For us educators, lesson planning can reduce stress because we have everything outlined. It also saves us a ton of time in the long run.

But did you know that lesson planning also benefits our students? When we have clear plans, students begin understanding routines, and the increased cohesion between our lesson components helps them get better results!

Even with all of the benefits, lesson planning for your intervention sessions can seem daunting! We believe it shouldn’t have to be!

Click here to download our FREE lesson planning guides, then continue reading for more information about each step in this process.

Steps one and two are big-picture planning.

Once these steps have been completed, you can reuse your plans from year to year with minimal tweaking. It will take some time upfront, but will save you a lot of time (and headaches) in the future.

Steps three, four, and five are more granular.

These will change from year to year based on your students and calendar.

Let’s dive into each of these steps in more detail!

Step 1: Outline Skill Buckets

Before creating our lesson plans, we need to determine the skills that students need to learn.

The great news is that the National Reading Panel already outlined the five core components or literacy for us! These include phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, and comprehension.

We need to determine which subskills for these components we need to include in our lesson plans and make sure we are targeting them, through both a reading and writing lens. We can use standards, assessments, curricula, and our own professional judgment to determine the subskills students need to possess by the end of the year.

It is also important to collaborate with other grade levels to determine prerequisite skills students already have and will need before they move on to the next grade.

We like to use page 4 of our lesson planning guide tools to help us outline these skills. Below is an example of what this might look like for a second-grade classroom. If you are unsure of what the subskills should look like, you can also take a peak at subskills of the 5 core components that have been outlined on page 3 of the lesson planning guides.

Step 2: Outline Skill Progressions

After we have determined the subskills that need to be taught, we can determine the order in which we will teach these skills (this is our sequence).

We can use a year-long calendar (included on page 5 of the lesson planning guides) and plug-in when we will teach each subskill. We want to make sure skills are building upon one another and that our progression of skills makes sense.

Here is an example of what this might look like for those second-grade subskills we outlined in step one.

Now, we are going to get granular!

Step 3: Collect Data & Determine Student Needs

The next step is collecting data.

We will need data to understand our class as a whole as well as individual students. We want to make sure we are collecting data on all five core components of reading + writing so we have a good baseline for our students. If you already have an assessment that measures each of these areas, awesome! If not, consider using a Fast 5 Unit from our 5 Core Components of Literacy Activity Library to fill in the gaps.

Once we have collected data, we can group students into one of four groups.

We will decide if students “need support” or are “on target” for word recognition skills (phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, and/or writing) and language comprehension skills (vocabulary and/or comprehension).

Then we can group them into the following groups based on their areas of need:

• Group A: On or Above-Level

• Group B: Needs Word Recognition Support Only

• Group C: Needs Language Comprehension Support Only

• Group D: Needs Word Recognition & Language Comprehension Support

A tool is provided on pages 6 & 7 of the lesson planning guides to help us easily group students.

Step 4: Consider Timing & Create Lesson Plans

Now that we have our outline for the year and our student data, we can determine what our weekly and daily lesson plans look like.

We use our lesson planning guides to help us plan. We want to make sure we are hitting all 5 core components of literacy from a reading and writing lens weekly. We will also want to plan our small group instruction to target areas in which our students need support.

We can use pages 8-10 of the lesson planning guides to help us plan out our weekly and daily lessons. Check out the second-grade example below!

Step 5: Prep Resources

Now that we know what we are going to teach, we can begin prepping resources.

We use activities from our 5 Core Components of Literacy Library for explicit, whole-group instruction and to pull resources for our small groups.

When prepping resources, we have found it helpful to organize our materials by week or lesson. Then, we color code activities according to which core component they are addressing to make sure we are hitting them all.

These 5 steps have made all of the difference in our literacy intervention!

While it takes a bit of time at the start, it has saved us so much time (and allowed our lessons to be more cohesive and effective!) in the long run.

Now, instead of trying to piece things together, we feel fully planned and prepped for the year.

Click here to grab your copy of the FREE Lesson Planning Guides so that you have the step-by-step outline to help you plan all of your literacy lessons this year.

Then, if you are looking for resources to use in your literacy instruction, we’d love to invite you to our 5-Core Components of Literacy Activity Library!

Inside you will access hundreds of resources to target phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, comprehension, AND writing. You’ll get high-engagement resources and activities to help students generalize their skills.

Jump in now to get 50% off your first month.