Oak National Academy

Plan a lesson

Find inspiration and save time planning

Our teaching resources are designed to give teachers all the tools they need to make lesson planning easy. Find out more about how you can adapt them for your class and school.

Learn more about our different resources and how they can support your planning

Starter quiz

Help your pupils retrieve or activate prior knowledge with our starter quizzes. Project them in your classroom, or print them off to use in class or as homework.

Video

Build your confidence tackling unfamiliar topics by observing experienced teachers delivering the lesson, or use the videos to support your pupils with homework and revision.

Slide deck

The majority of our slide decks can be downloaded and edited. Use them as a foundation for your own lesson plans, and adapt them to make them your own.

Worksheet

Our worksheets help your pupils practise key lesson content, and support your planning for questions and tasks. Use them in the classroom, for homework and revision.

Exit quiz

Finish your lesson with our exit quizzes, designed to test your pupils’ knowledge recall and to support you to identify areas which require reteaching.

How to plan a lesson using our resources and adapt them for your classroom.

1. Find the right lesson

Match your intended learning outcomes to the core content summary at the top of each Oak lesson overview page. Familiarise yourself with the resources by clicking through the slides, scanning the transcript and reviewing the quiz questions.

2. Tailor your explanation

Watch the video to inspire and refine how you will explain new content. Consider your pupils’ current levels of understanding, gaps in their knowledge, what they have learnt recently and what they will learn next when personalising your explanation.

3. Adapt the tasks for your class

Build in or remove additional scaffolding and support to suit the learning needs of your pupils. Decide how your class will complete each task and consider how you’ll divide your available time between tasks, explanations and quizzes.

4. Teach the lesson

Now you have reviewed, adapted and prepared the resources, it’s time to teach the lesson! While you’re teaching, try to tweak task formats, explanation wordings and check for understanding questions to ensure you are responding to the needs of your pupils.

Plan for lesson cover

Plan for lesson cover

Whether you’re arranging cover for your class or standing in for a colleague, make sure pupils’ learning doesn’t fall behind, without adding to your workload.

Select the lesson you need and you or your colleague can pick up from where the class left off when you return. Choose from our bank of teaching resources and use our recorded lesson videos to support teaching.

Plan for absent pupils

Keep pupils who are temporarily learning from home on track by directing them to curriculum-aligned lesson videos in our pupil area. Our videos give your pupils access to a teacher who explains and scaffolds their learning, just like you would in the classroom. And you can keep track of their progress with our quizzes; they can send their scores directly to you.