Preschool Lesson Plan Template

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Overwhelmed and looking to save yourself some time planning out your preschool themes? This free preschool lesson plan template is a fantastic way to streamline the process and fill your students’ days with fun and engaging educational activities!

My all-time favorite way to teach preschool is with theme units, but without a plan in place it’s really easy to get lost in a sea of books, printables, and Pinterest worthy projects.

There are literally thousands of resources available, our own comprehensive list of preschool themes included, for pretty much any theme idea you can think of, but simply creating a list of activities that you want to try does nothing but stress you out if you don’t have a way to organize those ideas into actual lesson plans.

That’s because the truth is, whether you’re a new preschool teacher or you’ve been in the classroom for a while, planning out daily lessons for your students can be an overwhelming task.

It doesn’t matter if you plan weekly, monthly, or for the whole school year, planning out educational lessons takes a considerable amount of time and no one approach works for every teacher every year, but having a basic template to work from as you build out your lesson plan can not only help you speed up the process but help take some of the stress off of you at the same time!

That’s where the free printable lesson plan template that you’ll find in the download below comes in.

The pdfs include templates for both daily and weekly plans as well as some with subjects already filled in and some without, giving you the ability to adapt your lesson planning process to what works best for you.

Creating Lessons Using the Preschool Lesson Plan Template

In this download, you’ll find a few different daily planner options, some with subjects included, some without, as well as a few different options for a weekly lesson plan template.

Try them all out and find out which one works best for you!

This step is important because if the method doesn’t really work well for you, you won’t stick with it and it’ll only make your job harder.

Once you’ve found your favorite template, it’s time to start building out those lesson plans and these step-by-step instructions are going to help you do just that!

Step 1 – Figure Out Your Theme

Some of you may have a map of sorts that has your themes for the year already laid out or your school may work off of monthly lesson plans, in which case, you’ll start by consulting those.

If that’s not the case, however, then you’ll need to decide what theme you’ll be using for the week.

The possibilities really are endless when it comes to theme ideas, but the absolute best preschool themes are those that fit your students’ interests.

If you’re in need of some new ideas, we’ve got an entire page dedicated to preschool themes with more than 170 of them to help you in your planning.

You’ll even find various theme ideas for the different months of the year and as we share more themed activities, you’ll be able to find these by simply clicking on the name of the theme.

Step 2 – Identify Your Objectives

Now that you’ve got your theme picked out, you’ll need to figure out what you’ll be teaching your preschoolers.

What skills will you be working on? What concepts will you be covering?

These are questions that you’ll need to answer before you can start picking out activities for the week.

You’ll need to make sure that the books, songs, and activities that you pick not only meet the developmental needs of your students right now, but that they also help you meet the learning objectives that you have for your students.

It’s in this step that you’ll be looking for balance.

Of course we want our students to play and have fun, especially during their preschool year, but we also want to ensure that they’re growing, learning, and progressing and keeping those learning objectives in mind from the very beginning of your planning process is a fantastic place to start!

If you’d like to get a clearer picture of where your preschoolers are and what they are struggling with, a preschool assessment is a great place to start!

We like to use one at both the beginning of the year and at the end so that we can see the progress that’s been made.

Step 3 – Pick Your Books

Books are an absolute essential when teaching young children and personally, I like to have them picked out for our theme before any of the activities so that I can keep them in the back of my mind throughout the entire process of lesson planning.

For me, this ensures that those books, and the stories within them, are truly the focal point of our learning.

And although this post is primarily geared towards planning out your preschool themes, books are essential regardless of age.

Whether your kids are in pre-k, kindergarten, or even higher grades, building a lifelong love of learning typically begins with books so you’ll want to make sure that you’re including as many developmentally appropriate books as you can for each theme that you teach.

Step 4 – Compile Your List of Activities

Now that you’ve figured out your theme, identified your learning objectives, and picked out the books that you’ll use for this theme, it’s time for the fun part!

With your themed books and learning objectives in mind, it’s time to start compiling the list of activities that will make up your theme.

Whether you’re browsing through Pinterest and your favorite websites for ideas that fit your theme or you’re making them yourself, you’ll want to make sure that you include a wide variety of different activities.

Things like math and literacy activities, maybe a science experiment or two, activities for the whole class and some for small groups as well as a few activities that work on developing social skills.

They’re all important and using a planning page from our free lesson plan templates is a great way to make sure that you cover all of your bases.

Step 5 – Plan It All Out

Once you’ve completed the first four steps, you’ll have all of the components of a good lesson plan. Now, you just need to put it all together!

Grab your preschool lesson plan template and start filling in the boxes!

Pair those themed activities with the books that you picked out and make sure that you’re offering your preschool class a well rounded mix of activities each day.

Once you have your own lesson plan all filled out, take a minute to glance back over the entire thing and make sure that you’re happy with how it looks.

Change things up a bit and move things around a little if you need to.

Again, this preschool lesson plan template is meant to give you a basic plan to follow in order to create daily lesson plans for your students, but above all, it needs to work for you and your students.

Once you’re happy with it, grab a 3 ring binder and store your lesson plans in there so that you can reference and reuse them for years to come!