Guide for teachers
How to write a CAPS lesson plan: a step-by-step guide
A practical guide for South African teachers: how to turn your ATP into lesson plans your HOD will approve, with objectives, activities, assessment and resources. Works for any CAPS grade and subject.
The 10 steps
1. Start from your ATP, not a blank page
Open the Annual Teaching Plan for your grade, subject and term, and find the week you are planning. Copy the topic, the content and concepts, and any assessment the ATP lists for that week. If the ATP gives one topic to several weeks, decide which part you will teach each week so that you are not repeating yourself.
2. Decide how many lessons the week has
Check your timetable. If you teach the subject four times this week, split the week’s content into four lessons that build on each other. Each lesson gets its own plan.
3. Write clear aims and objectives
Write two or three objectives that say what learners will be able to do by the end of the lesson. Start each one with an action word you can check: name, describe, explain, calculate, compare, draw. “Learners will understand maps” is hard to check; “learners will use the scale to work out the distance between two towns” is not.
4. Note prior knowledge and the link to the next lesson
Write down what learners already know that today builds on, and how today prepares them for the next lesson. This shows your HOD that lessons follow a sequence.
5. List the vocabulary
List the new words learners must understand and use. Plan when you will explain each one, especially for learners taught in their second language.
6. Plan the teacher and learner activities, with time
Split the lesson into an introduction (about 5 to 10 minutes: link to prior knowledge, a question or picture to get learners thinking), the body (explain or demonstrate, then guided practice and individual or group work) and a conclusion (5 minutes: summarise, check understanding, give homework). For each part, write what you do and what learners do.
7. Plan the assessment
Every lesson needs informal assessment: questions, observation, a short exercise or exit ticket. When the ATP lists a formal assessment task for the week, include it and note how you will mark it.
8. Plan for different learners
Add support for learners who struggle (a worked example, a word bank, working in pairs) and an extension activity for learners who finish early.
9. List your resources
List the DBE workbook pages, textbook pages, charts, objects and worksheets you need, so everything is ready before the lesson.
10. Reflect after the lesson
Afterwards, write one or two lines: what worked, what did not, and what to repeat next lesson. HODs value this, and it makes next year’s planning easier.
An example: Grade 6 Geography, Term 1
Topic: Map skills. Content this lesson: latitude and longitude.
Objectives: learners will name the Equator and the Greenwich Meridian, and give the position of a place using degrees of latitude and longitude.
Activities: introduction with a globe and the question “How would you tell a pilot exactly where your school is?” (10 min); teacher demonstrates lines of latitude and longitude on an atlas map (15 min); learners find the positions of five South African cities in pairs (15 min); conclusion: three learners explain their answers, exit question (5 min).
Assessment: informal, by observing pair work and marking the exit question. Resources: globe, atlases, DBE workbook.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Planning from memory instead of the ATP, so the lesson does not match the week your HOD checks.
- Objectives you cannot check, such as “understand” or “know”.
- No time next to each activity, so the lesson runs over and the conclusion gets skipped.
- Assessment left out, or only formal tasks with no informal checks.
- The same plan copied for every lesson of a topic that runs over several weeks.
Use a template
A template keeps every lesson plan complete and in the same order. Download our free CAPS lesson plan template for Word, or let Lesson Plan Gen write the lesson plans from your ATP and check them yourself.
Free Word template