✨ What Makes the Perfect Lesson? (Spoiler: It’s Not Just About English!)

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 Hi there! 

Are you already planning for the next school year? If your answer is yes, I might have something for you right here ;) 

Have you ever asked yourself if there is such a thing as the perfect lesson? 🤔

I think the answer is... a recipe for creating lessons where children feel involved, motivated and excited to learn.

And the best part? This isn't just for English lessons... it's a structure that can work across any subject.

One of the first things I have always taken into account while planning is my students' attention spans. Every age group is different, and that's something we absolutely need to respect, but respecting children's attention span doesn't mean staying within their limits forever: one of our goals is definitely to gently stretch them. How? By keeping our pupils engaged with a variety of meaningful activities that naturally flow from one to the next.

After sharing many different lesson plans over the past few years, for this post I stopped to analyze what a typical lesson at Miss Lucy's Teaching Fun looks like, so that you can use it as a framework to fill up with your own materials and strategies:

🎵 1. Connect
We begin with songs, routines and a quick review. Children activate prior knowledge, build confidence and get into "learning mode."

📚 2. Explore
A picture book, flashcards, a game or a real object introduces the new topic. But the real magic happens through questions. I encourage children to make predictions, recall previous learning and actively participate instead of simply listening silently.

✂️ 3. Create
Arts and crafts, colouring and cutting, modelling with plasticine or other hands-on activities allow children to process what they've learned in a meaningful way. Learning becomes something they do, not just something they hear.

🌟 4. Reflect
Before the lesson ends, we revisit the learning of the day with a few simple questions and celebrate everyone's effort with a little reward (a sticker, a stamp, a candy). It's a small moment that helps consolidate learning and leaves children feeling successful. 

As you can see, every stage of the lesson is planned with a clear purpose. Learning needs structure, and my planning is strongly inspired by Bloom's Taxonomy. Of course, there's always room for flexibility, but the structure is what makes meaningful learning possible.

We start by remembering previous learning, then move on to understanding new concepts through stories and discussion. Children apply what they've learned during practical activities, while the questions we ask encourage them to analyse, make connections and explain their thinking. Even the simplest craft can become an opportunity to create something personal using new language or new knowledge.

I believe a great lesson isn't about filling an hour with activities, but it's about designing a journey where every step has a purpose.

When children are engaged, thinking, moving, creating and reflecting, learning becomes deeper, more meaningful... and much more fun. 💛

Now I'd love to hear from you!

What are your essential ingredients for the perfect lesson?

Do you consciously plan around Bloom's Taxonomy, or do you have another framework that guides your teaching?

Let's share ideas in the comments! 👇✨

From remembering to creating: guiding our students through Bloom’s Taxonomy

Bloom's Taxonomy

Hi there! 👋

Today I’m going to introduce something that school teachers are already familiar with, for sure, but… as the old Latin saying goes, repetita iuvant! 😉

Sometimes, revisiting well-known concepts and looking at them through practical examples is exactly what we need to make ideas clearer, more meaningful and easier to apply in our everyday teaching practice.

So today, let’s talk about a powerful tool that can help us design learning experiences that truly support our students’ thinking journey: Bloom’s Taxonomy. 🌱

In our previous post about cooperative learning, we talked about Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) — those powerful thinking skills that allow our students to analyse, evaluate and create — often compared with Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS), which are connected to remembering and understanding information.

But here’s the important thing: both are essential! 💡

They are all part of one of the most famous tools in education: Bloom’s Taxonomy.

📚The six levels of the pyramid represent the different steps our learners go through as they build knowledge:

🔹 Remembering
Recalling facts, information and previously learned skills.

🔹 Understanding
Explaining, describing, comparing and making sense of information.

🔹 Applying
Using knowledge in new situations and real-life contexts.

🔹 Analyzing
Exploring information, identifying patterns and making connections.

🔹 Evaluating
Expressing opinions, making judgements and supporting ideas with evidence.

🔹 Creating
Designing, inventing and producing something new.

✨ Why is Bloom’s Taxonomy such a valuable tool when planning learning experiences?

Because learning is not just about collecting information. In fact, meaningful learning happens when students are gradually supported in moving from “I know this” to “I can use this, I can question it, I can create something with it.”

This is closely connected to Bruner’s scaffolding theory: as teachers, we build the right supports at the right time, accompanying our students step by step until they can become more independent learners.

For example, imagine introducing the topic of historical sources to a Grade 3 class. A possible learning journey could look like this:

📌 REMEMBERING activities

• Sharing what students already know about the past.

• Learning the definition of “historical source”.

• Identifying different types of sources and examples.

📌 UNDERSTANDING activities

• Classifying sources according to their type.

• Creating diagrams or organisers to describe their characteristics.

📌 APPLYING activities

• Bringing historical objects from home.

• Interviewing parents, grandparents or members of the school community to discover how objects were used in the past.

📌 ANALYZING activities

• Describing a source in detail: what it was used for, where it came from, why it was important, how it compares to modern versions.

• Looking for similarities and differences between objects brought by classmates.

• Creating mind maps about historical sources.

📌 EVALUATING activities

• Discussing which sources are the most valuable for historians and explaining why.

• Interpreting the meaning of a source within its historical context.

📌 CREATING activities

• Designing a presentation about the sources investigated.

• Creating a timeline showing how objects have changed over time.

• Building a classroom museum. 🏛️

The beautiful thing about Bloom’s Taxonomy is that it can be applied to any subject and any topic. Whether we are exploring science, history, languages or mathematics, this framework helps us design learning experiences that go beyond memorisation.

And there is another important connection: the development of these thinking skills is deeply linked to the development of competences. If we think of competence as the combination of knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and emotions that learners use in real situations, we immediately see why the top of the pyramid — analysing, evaluating and creating — is so important.

🌟 For this reason, understanding and applying Bloom’s Taxonomy is a powerful skill for every teacher. It is not only useful in IB contexts; it is a universal tool to help our students become curious, independent and lifelong learners.

Because the goal is not simply for children to remember more…

…it is for them to think more. 💭✨

Quiero leer este post en español