Tips For Teaching Your First Flocabulary Lesson Blog (1)

Tips for teaching your first Flocabulary lesson

Welcome to back-to-school season with Flocab! We know you’re busy preparing for your students, and we’re here to help you by providing lesson plan ideas to incorporate into your curriculum.

We’ve created lesson plans to complement and enhance your instruction, whether you’re introducing concepts, mastering key terms and ideas or establishing a positive classroom culture. Oh, and each lesson plan is standards-aligned, so keeping students engaged and on-track just got easier.

Lesson plans are separated by subject and level, Elementary and Middle School, and we are continually creating more to go along with our lessons. 

For back-to-school, we asked some Flocab teachers and MCEducators about the lessons and videos they like to start their instruction with.

What We Found:

Many teachers like to start their instruction with SEL lessons.

Social and Emotional Learning is important for every age group and helps build a positive classroom culture at the beginning of the year.

Brenda Bouldin

Elementary School Teacher, South Carolina

I love Flocabulary lesson plans and so do my students. They are engaging and easy to implement. I plan on using the SMART Goals Planning lesson plan. So often our students know we expect them to grow, but that’s like putting someone on a road that has multiple destinations. They need to have a specific destination in mind that they can work towards getting to, so that the road doesn’t seem boring, tiresome or endless. This lesson plan only takes one video, and is perfect for those days that you can’t teach academic content but you want to ensure you are being a productive, effective educator.

Melody McAllister

2nd Grade Teacher, Texas

Goal Setting is my go-to first Flocab lesson because growth mindset is my number one priority in prep for the challenges my students will encounter daily. I love all social and emotional learning topics, they are necessary to help fuel perseverance.

Dustin Ecker

4th Grade Teacher, Indiana

The lesson plan for the Bullying video is a great one to use in your BTS plans because it is not only informative but is also an easy one to incorporate collaboration and a sense of unity against bullying. Students could finish the lesson by working with a buddy or two to develop anti-bullying posters while incorporating things they had learned from the video and lesson.

Desiree Taylor

Elementary School Teacher, North Carolina

I use the Joining In and Including Others lesson. On the first day of school, I typically use this video to reenforce the importance of being kind and allowing others to join in and play or simply letting others know when the next game is starting and they are able to join. With teaching first grade, lots of times feelings are hurt from not understanding why they can’t play at that moment.

See More SEL Lessons:

Reviewing Topics is Always Useful.

Starting the year off by reviewing students’ summer reading will also bring a review of important ELA topics. Summarizing, inferencing and character analysis are great lessons to incorporate in early instruction.

Renee Owens

8th Grade ELA Teacher, Pennsylvania

Last year, we utilized literary terms early on because the vocabulary lessons and cards were more engaging than what we had done in the past.

See ELA Lessons:

Incorporating Current Events with Timely Social Studies Lessons Keeps History Engaging.

Start your year by reviewing what happened in the news over the summer with our Summer Recap edition of the Week in Rap. If you’re teaching U.S. History, we have a lesson plan on the Age of Exploration, where many teachers start their year. Many of our Social Studies lesson plans are also incorporated into the new Month by Month section on the home page, so relevant and timely lessons will be easier to find.

Megan Forbes

Middle School Teacher, California

With my History classes, we get started on current events right away and use the Week in Rap videos every Friday. I like to start the year with lessons from the Geography playlist so that students know basic geographical vocabulary.

See History Lessons:

Building Off of Flocab Lesson Plans and Lessons Helps Supplement Your Curriculum.

Danielle Marriaga

3rd Grade Teacher, Florida

I find that the lesson plans are a great starting point when developing your individual plans. The lesson plans include a description of the lesson/video, objectives and standards covered, pacing and sequencing of the lessons, products students can create and a wrap up for the lesson. I use the Lesson Plans to get ideas, think about ways to use the Flocabulary resources within the pacing of the content I am teaching.