Setting up your OneNote template for daily lesson plans

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to set up your daily lesson plan template in OneNote. It’s pretty simple – and you can easily set up different templates for various purposes. Once you’ve got your template just the way you like it, copy/paste will give you as many blank pages as you need.The color website mentioned is design-seeds.com – have fun picking out some nice color schemes!

If you’re not sure how OneNote can be used to organized your classes, check out my post on teaching with OneNote.

How I use my OneNote templates

I use two different OneNote templates in my daily classes. I’ve done this for both virtual learning and in-person learning. I have a daily lesson plan/notes template that gives students all of the information about the day’s lesson. This might include graphics, anchor charts, verb charts, or even a YouTube video discussing a grammar point. I also include the day’s objective at the top.

The second OneNote template is the homework template. I have a base template that has sections for different skills: reading, listening, writing, grammar, vocabulary, culture, speaking. I don’t give an assignment for each skill each day but I try to rotate them throughout the week. In the past, I would gray out the sections that they didn’t have an assignment in, but I’ve since changed that. Now I delete the rows that we won’t be using. I don’t know if it makes a difference to the students, but it keeps things cleaner for me.

One thing I like about using OneNote templates to organize my plans is that they can easily be repurposed the following year. This year I had only one prep – French 1-2. Last year I had one class of 1-2, so I already had lesson plans and notes ready to go. Since we switched from 3 classes block schedule for 18 weeks to a 6 classe block schedule for 36 weeks, I did have to shuffle things around a bit. but copy/paste made quick work of that!