Planning lessons is a real skill and one that all teachers need to develop. When you’re training, it can seem like the hardest thing in the world. There are lots of published schemes and websites that provide lesson plans, and these can give you some good ideas - but they don’t always work for your particular class and teaching style.

On the standards website (see below), there are very detailed Year 6 exemplar literacy plans illustrating all the stages in planning, from medium-term objectives to individual lessons. There are also hundreds of plans on the Teachernet website.

But you should be creative, and finding the right format for you will be a process that you will need to go through. The most useful formats are easy to follow - and you need to gain access to them quickly in case there is a distraction or you lose your train of thought. Most plans have these key elements:

* Date, time, subject or year group * learning objective (with national curriculum reference) * Assessment criteria * Resources * Teaching and key questions * Distribution of whole-class and group activities * What additional adults should do.

Start with the learning objective, chosen from the school’s curriculum, then translate this into what you want the children to know and understand. In this case, you need to know what the pupils already know. This is called using assessment to inform planning - one of the standards for qualified teacher status. Good teaching involves this cycle: plan, do, assess, plan, etc.

If you’re not very focused on a specific learning outcome, you will run into problems. It is always tempting to think of activities before considering what the pupils will be learning. For instance, Peter wrote learning objectives such as “characteristic features of a period; instruction text - dissolving”. He didn’t break these down into small units so the children seemed to be doing activities that kept them busy rather than learning. By thinking more precisely about what he wanted them to learn, he wrote specific learning outcomes such as:

* How rich and poor children lived in Victorian times;

* To work out how instructions are written and be able to write some.

If you phrase outcomes as you would tell them to the class, you won’t go far wrong. Shirley Clarke uses the acronym WALT - “we are learning to”. This may help to keep this idea in mind.

Then you need to think of how to enable pupils to meet objectives, what what resources to use, what activities pupils will do and how you’ll teach.

If you’re new to lesson planning, it’s helpful to imagine the lesson and write a chronological plan. Timings - with the resources to be used - can help pace no end. Make your introduction really tight - you can even script the main points. And check your ideas with others. I’ve seen some crazy things: for example, a teacher who wrote, for a literacy strategy objective: “to discuss characters’ feelings, behaviour and relationships, referring to the text”. The teacher in question chose to use Mr Men books with Year 3 children.

These are popular with pre-school children and have very one-dimensional characters - they’re not exactly what the authors of the literacy strategy had in mind.

Think about different learning styles. People learn through visual, auditory and kinaesthetic (physical interaction) stimuli. Some children learn better through one more than another, so aim for a mixture of them.

You should also consider differentiation. Different needs can be met in a range of ways, such as:

* Same task that pupils do with varying degrees of success * Same task but with different expectations for different pupils * Adult support to enable low attainers to succeed * Different resources to help or make the task harder * Different tasks.

Differentiation is hard. You need to find out what the high and low attainers can and cannot do and then adapt your expectations. Shirley Clarke’s term WILF - “what I’m looking for” - can help you have realistic but challenging expectations. These can also be your assessment criteria. The plenary is an excellent opportunity for you and the pupils to see how the objective of the lesson has been met.

Remember: the better you plan, the better the lesson will go - and you’ll get such a buzz out of it.

* Standards website: www.standards.dfes.gov.ukliteracy l Visit www.teachernet.gov.uk for detailed Year 6 plans (look in Resources section)l Shirley Clarke’s book ‘Targeting Assessment in the Primary Classroom’ is published by Hodder and Stoughton, pound;12.99