Consider the age of the children you are teaching. You may be teaching 3-, 4- or 5-year-olds. Age is important during the preschool years because younger kids, in general, have a shorter attention span. A 5-year-old will be able to sit for a longer period of time than a 3-year-old.
Identify your goals for the preschoolers and the time frame in which you have to teach it. Whether you work at a preschool/daycare center or for the Head Start program, your goal should be preparing the children for kindergarten. This may entail teaching them how to tie their shoes, recognize letters and numbers or socialize with their peers. Take into consideration the length of time you have with the children daily and the teaching term. At a daycare facility, children often remain in the same room for a year, while kids in a school-managed program generally attend school for 9 or 10 months.
Select a topic, and research activities and methods of teaching the topic. For example, if you decide to have a color of the week, you will need to find enough activities for five days. Those activities may include only using that color crayon and paint, spelling the color and making a flip book with items that are the color of the week. When the color of the week is blue, kids can cut pictures of blueberries and blue clothes and items out of a magazine, for example. The lesson will reinforce what the color blue looks like, how to use scissors and how to make a flip book.
Write your lesson plans in a planner. Include a unit name, lesson title and author, age and grade the lesson was written for, amount of time needed to teach the lesson and a description, objective and the materials needed for the lesson. Creating a complete lesson planner will help you in the future if you take notes on what worked and did not work, so you can update, improve and reuse the planner.
Be flexible. If the preschoolers show an interest in animals or telephones one week, disregard your original lesson plan in favor of following up on the children's topic. The simplest way to keep preschoolers' attention is to teach them about things they are interested in. Another option is to incorporate their interest into the lesson plan. For example, if you are working on the color red, but the kids are talking about cell phones, make red cell phones. Structure is important, however. When kids enjoy what they're doing, they learn better.