How I Used Three AI Skills to Create Elementary Lesson Plans at Home

With summer vacation keeping my child at home, I decided to apply three AI‑driven skills to transform PDF textbooks into a complete set of teaching materials: a Word lesson plan, a PowerPoint presentation, and Word homework assignments.

1. PDF Parsing Skill

I searched GitHub for open‑source textbooks and chose a third‑grade English PDF rich in illustrations. To extract its content I used my own z-smart-xparse intelligent document parser, previously described in an article about my AI digital employee. The parser successfully processed the PDF, as shown in the accompanying screenshots.

2. Prepare Lesson Plan and Homework Word

After parsing, I leveraged the Anthropic repository that provides two teacher‑specific Skills, using the k12-lesson-planning skill to create a lesson from scratch. Example prompts include:

"帮我备一节五年级长除法的课"

"明天要教光合作用，帮我做个教案"

"I need a lesson plan for 3rd grade fractions"

The skill generated a single editable Word package containing:

Lesson plan (lesson_plan.docx)

Student materials (student_materials.docx)

Classroom observation template (observation_template.docx)

Sample outputs—lesson plan, observation template, and homework—are displayed in the images below.

3. Classroom PPT

Having a lesson plan is not enough; a PPT is required for teaching. I repurposed a template from a corporate training session, summarised it into a Skill that supports both long‑form and slide‑by‑slide formats, and plan to open‑source it later. The usage and resulting slides are shown in the following screenshots, which I consider satisfactory and improvable with further fine‑tuning.

The entire workflow proceeded smoothly, and anyone with similar needs can replicate it.

Despite the effort, I concluded that being a teacher is tougher than it looks, and I’ll likely send my child to an extracurricular class for a carefree summer.