Four Leaves is built to drop into a lesson you are already teaching, not to replace a scheme of work. This is how teachers tend to use it, and the practical details worth knowing before you start.
What a lesson plan contains
Each plan gathers three things, so there is nothing to assemble on the morning. A reference pack to print — worksheets, props, anything that goes on a table. A sample lesson showing the idea taught. And teaching guidelines: how to run it, what to look for, where children usually get stuck.
Plans sit inside a topic, and topics sit inside one of the four leaves. So related ideas are already next to each other, and planning a sequence is a matter of working through a topic rather than hunting across a library.
Fitting it to a period
- Read the guidelines first — they are written for the adult, not the class.
- Print the reference pack the day before. Most of it is designed to be used away from a screen.
- Watch the sample lesson once yourself. It is quicker than reading a plan and shows the pacing.
- Leave more time for the activity than for the input. The input is the short part.
“Plan the practice. The explanation is the easy half.”
Mixed ability in one room
Plans are tagged by age band — Pre-school, Class 1–2, Class 3–5 — but a band is a starting point, not a verdict. The same activity usually stretches in both directions: ask a confident child to explain their reasoning to someone else, and give a struggling one the same task with one step already done.
Where a class is genuinely split, the band below often works better as a shared starting point than the band above. Nobody learns much from an activity they cannot enter.
Using it across a term
The four leaves are designed to be interleaved rather than taught in blocks. A fortnight of cognitive skills followed by a fortnight of socio-emotional learning works less well than alternating — partly because the skills reinforce each other, and partly because returning to a topic after a gap is what makes it stick.
One period, laid out
A forty-minute period, as it tends to go in practice. The proportions matter more than the exact minutes.
- 5 minutes — settle, and one question that opens the idea without answering it.
- 6 minutes — the sample lesson, watched straight through, no pausing to quiz.
- 3 minutes — talk in pairs. What happened? Why did it work?
- 20 minutes — the reference pack. This is the lesson; everything before it was setup.
- 6 minutes — bring two or three children's answers to the front, including one that went wrong.
Showing work that went wrong, with the child's permission and without blame, is worth more than showing three correct answers. It is also how a class learns that being wrong partway is normal rather than shameful.
Knowing whether it landed, without a test
You rarely need to mark anything to know. Listening during the paired talk tells you more than a worksheet will, because you hear reasoning rather than answers.
Two questions are usually enough. Ask a child to explain their answer to someone who was not listening — explaining is where understanding either holds or falls apart. Then ask what would change if one detail were different. A child who can answer that has the idea, not just the result.
Problems you will probably hit
- The video ends and the room is still buzzing. Expected. Build the paired talk in rather than fighting it.
- Finishers finish early. Have the “explain it to someone” task ready as the default extension.
- The printing did not happen. The guidelines are written so a lesson can be run on a board at a pinch — but the pack is where the learning is, so treat this as a bad day rather than a plan.
- A child who has seen the lesson before. Give them the explaining job. It is harder than the worksheet.
Sequencing across a term
A term's worth of planning is usually a question of how many topics to attempt rather than how many lessons. Two or three topics per leaf, revisited, beats working through every plan once. The second encounter with an idea is where it becomes durable, and a term that covers less but returns more leaves a class further ahead.
If you are choosing where to start, begin with the cognitive leaf. Attention and working memory are what every other lesson draws on, and a class that has practised them explicitly is easier to teach for the rest of the year.
Other adults in the room
The guidelines are written for whoever is running the lesson, which may not be you. A teaching assistant can take a plan unaided, and a plan handed over with the guidelines read is a far better use of them than circulating while you lead.
The same applies to a parent helper. Give them the explaining task — sitting with two children while they justify their answers to someone who was not listening. It needs no subject knowledge and is the highest-value job in the room.
Absence, and children joining late
Because each plan is self-contained, a child who misses one has not fallen behind a sequence; they have missed one idea. That is deliberate, and it makes catching up a matter of sending the pack home rather than rebuilding a thread.
A child joining mid-term can start anywhere. Pick the topic the class is on rather than the one they “should” have had, and let the gap fill in on the next pass.
Where English is not the first language
The sample lesson carries most of the meaning visually, which helps more than it might sound — a child can follow what is happening before they can follow every word. Watching it twice is worth more here than anywhere else.
In the paired talk, pair deliberately rather than at random, and let children reason in whichever language they think in. The thinking is the thing being practised; the English will come, and it comes faster from a child who understood the idea than from one who was silent in the right language.
Preparing more than one class at a time
If you teach the same plan across a year group, print once for all of it — the packs are designed to be photocopied, not consumed one at a time. Reading the guidelines once covers every repeat, and the second delivery of a lesson is always better than the first, so it is worth teaching your least confident group last.
If you are using Four Leaves across a whole school rather than one classroom, write to us. That is a different conversation from a single account, and a welcome one.