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Time is Precious, Lesson Plan for Multiple Purposes

We all dread the four letter word of education: TIME! I want to talk a little today about how you can get more out of your time with your kids, how to plan to hit multiple skills and domains at once.

This post is the start of a series of posts that I have in mind, on how you can multiply the number of skills that you are working on with your kids as you plan for lessons. I am going to make a few assumptions:
  1. You believe that you are teacher of the whole child, not just your content area. (If you don't believe this please take some time to evaluate your position!)
  2. You believe that all skills, like content, can and should be taught. 
  3. It is our job to teach these skills in school, for example the 4 Cs (you know the 4 Cs, right? 😏, just in case they are listed below.)
    • Communication
    • Collaboration
    • Critical Thinking
    • Creation
Let's say you want your kids to do a research project. When lesson planning you could simply through a rubric together or find one online, hand it out to the kids, and say "Go research creating a presentation on the topic, fitting the criteria of the rubric." We've all done this! But what if we think a bit deeper about how we can get more out of a project such as this one. In the video below I'll explain how you can get more out of your lesson plan of creating a presentation than the scenario I've quickly outlined above.

 This certainly isn't the only example, set of technologies, or way to think about getting more bang for your buck in this scenario rather one example! Point is, when we step back and think a bit deeper about what we can get out of our lesson plans we can increase the worth of a lesson for our and kids TIME! I very much appreciate your time and attention and hope you found this post helpful! I hope to see you back for the next post in this installment of Bang for Your Buck lesson planning series. 

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