A Lesson Plan Format for Deeply Exploring Standards

A lot of times when we think about planning a unit, we imagine really wide, sweeping units over an entire genre, like nonfiction. Or you might envision a unit under a specific theme, like love, where you showcase a variety of genres. These units are great for covering a lot of standards at once, but you’ve probably run into a common issue: you don’t always have time to dive deep into standards.

When planning smaller units or mini-units, you can focus on a specific standard or skill so students walk away with a much deeper understanding. I want to give you a lesson planning example or breakdown of how I plan these focused units.

How to Plan a Mini-Unit

Before I show you my lesson planning example, I want to give you an idea of how I try to build these mini-lessons. I generally follow the same unit planning format, so I know I am scaffolding students through the skills. It also just makes it easier to plan when you already have a format in mind.

Lesson One: Introduction

This lesson is simply the teacher introducing or reintroducing the concept to students. Students might take notes on the concept they’re learning, and the teacher can utilize support resources like videos. I also like to add an exit ticket or quick check at the end of this lesson to check for understanding. 

Lesson Two: Practice

For this lesson, think simple. The concept is still fairly new to students, so this practice is easing them into the skill a little more. Give students an easy way to practice, and let them start off the mini-unit with a feeling of success. For this practice lesson, use things like short quizzes, matching games, or even a worksheet.

Lesson Three: Extended Practice

This lesson is where you’ll go deeper into the practice and find a more engaging and interactive activity. When planning the unit, come up with some hands-on and interactive activities for this lesson. This can be as simple as stations or a game, or as involved as a mini-escape room or a question trail. By this point, students should have a fairly solid grasp of the concept.

Lesson Four: Application

Here is where you’ll see how well your students understand the concept. For this lesson, have students create something that shows they can apply the skill they’ve been practicing. The big difference here is between students simply filling something out and actually being the ones to create the content. This will look different for every unit. For example, in a lesson I taught on narrative plot development, students had to create a plot for their own original story. 

Lesson Five: Extended Application or Analysis 

Now that they’ve applied the skill, this lesson seals the deal. Students will create some sort of cumulative content to show their mastery of the standard. You could have students do an essay, an escape room, a presentation, or even a traditional final exam. Take into consideration your own students and how they best demonstrate their knowledge.

Lesson Six: Extension

This lesson is optional and therefore isn’t always included when planning a mini-unit. If you feel like you need to see your students’ standard mastery in multiple ways, let it spill over into day six. You can have students do a more creative application one day and a more traditional one the other day. You might also decide to use this extension lesson based on how complex the topic is and how many ways students can demonstrate their mastery. 

Lesson Planning Example

Now that we’ve walked through the steps of planning a unit, let’s look at a lesson planning example. This lesson planning example is just one version of a mini-unit, but it might help you see how I apply it.

For this lesson planning example, I’ll be talking through my narrative dialogue mini-unit. I reference three mentor texts: Ghost by Jason Reynolds, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, and Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick. I use these texts as a mentor text to showcase examples to students.

The purpose of this mini-unit is to really deep dive into narrative dialogue, so I broke the unit into four different lessons. Here’s a breakdown of this lesson planning example:

Lesson One: Introduce the elements of narrative writing and have students take notes using their interactive notebook page.

Lesson Two: Continue introducing the elements of narrative writing and taking notes. (There are two days for this because it’s a lot to introduce, and we are looking at mentor text examples along the way.)

Lesson Three: Students will be introduced to the focus standard, which is using dialogue correctly. They will note the rules of using dialogue in their interactive notebooks. They will also apply their knowledge to a worksheet about dialogue and to some mentor texts.

Lesson Four: Students will go deeper with their knowledge, now creating their own narrative essay outline and deciding how they will use dialogue effectively. They will fill out a graphic organizer to begin planning.

Want to get units like these every month? Join the Hungry Teacher’s Hub! At the beginning of every single month, our members receive a brand-new ELA collection in a mini-unit format. These mini-units are not available anywhere else and include four to six lesson plans. These ELA collection mini-units focus on specific skills that students may need additional support with in order to fully master.

Join the waitlist to know when the Hub opens.