Anatomy of a Lesson

Each lesson contains five lectures intended to span five days, with the fifth day reserved for testing and evaluation. Each lecture will require between 30 minutes and 1 hour of teaching time, plus another 15 minutes to an hour of homework outside of class. Ideally, you would start on a Monday and finish on a Friday. This scheduling would be ideal for 6- and 7-year-old students.  If students are struggling to keep up or you are teaching younger students, ages 4-5, then you can switch to a lesson every other day and testing and evaluation every two weeks. For older students, 8 years and up, you can instead do two lessons a day and combine two weeks of testing and evaluation into a single quiz. At one lesson a week, this teacher’s guide covers the first quarter of a four-quarter school year.

The first page of every lesson contains a summary of lesson objectives, materials needed, common core requirements met, and daily lecture titles as well as hyperlinks to each lecture.

Lectures themselves have a header indicating the lecture title, which is generally the theme of that lecture, lesson number, and day number 1-5. There are three basic typesettings you will see. The red unindented typesetting contains instructions for you, the teacher. The indented black/gray text is a script that you read aloud or paraphrase to your students. The larger comic sans font indicates figures you may draw or write on a whiteboard or display electronically via a PowerPoint slide presentation. There are also numerous sidebars providing additional information that may be useful to you, the teacher, at that point in the lecture.

You will also see icons next to assignments.

  This icon indicates an in-class assignment to be done during class with assistance from you.
Games and Puzzles This icon indicates a game or puzzle.
This icon indicates a homework assignment to be completed by students outside of class on their own.
This icon indicates an in-class quiz or evaluation.