Gain Student Independence With ➔

How to Make a Yearly Curriculum Plan

I started making a curriculum plan about 2 years after I started teaching. I realized that there were a lot of topics that intertwined among the subjects I taught, and I needed to find a better way to weave them together.

I’m going to be honest, a lot of my fellow teachers think I’m crazy for planning out a year in advance. It does require time and patience and takes away from your much-needed summer break.

Despite all this, I’ve found that putting in the time during summer makes lesson planning during the school year go A LOT faster and alleviates my stress.

So, if you want to be that crazy summer planner lady like me, read below and find out some tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years.

Prep Work

Before I enter anything into my curriculum planning calendar I do some prep work on the form. I consider the following things:

  • School calendar – mark all special events and vacations. The more detailed you can get the better. Some special events take up more time than others and can throw off your entire week if you don’t take them into consideration.
  • Standards – It can be hard to squeeze everything in! Some standards are taught daily while some need specific time set aside to ensure they are covered.
  • Available resources – consider the curriculum you already possess. A certain piece of the curriculum might only have 35 weeks of material and you teach for 40 weeks (for example). Decide if you will start that curriculum later in the year, or supplement at the end.
  • Needed resources – curriculum planning has helped me see what gaps I had in my curriculum. When I match up the standards to my resources I often see there’s a disconnect. Doing this ahead of time helps me to source new material to cover gaps. It’s far easier to find these gaps ahead of time rather than the week you’re supposed to teach that standard.

Do you have the standards app? I love having it open on my phone as I fill out my curriculum plan on my computer:

Common Core Standards App

NGSS Standards App

What to Write Down

The great thing about curriculum planning is you can individualize your plan. All teachers have different planning styles and need the flexibility to do what works for them. These are some of the things that I write down on my calendar for each subject:

  • Curriculum page numbers
  • Spelling words
  • Sight words
  • Vocabulary words
  • Read-aloud books
  • Essential questions
  • Worksheet resources
  • Art picture examples
  • Standards
  • Focus skill

As I said, it is totally up to you on how much (or how little) you want to record. You can also divide the boxes in any way you choose. Here is an example of one I did a few years ago:

Cross-Curricular Learning

I like to integrate topics across all subject areas as often as I can. If we are learning about plants in science, I like to read Tops and Bottoms during language arts. This is also a great time to talk about farmers within a community helpers unit. Maybe we’ll compose some thank you letters during writing time to our local community helpers.

All of this cross-curricular planning helps to build content-specific knowledge and reinforce new vocabulary.

Once you start thinking in these cross-curricular terms, you see connections everywhere. Planning this way allows you to dive deep into a topic and cover things that you might not have previously been able to get to when teaching it in isolation.

Planning around a theme is also great for kindergarten! Check out my giant list of themes that you can incorporate into your yearly plan.

Lesson Planning

It’s possible for you to make a curriculum plan and never look at it again. You might get tied down in the day-to-day chaos and the calendar will sit in your teacher bag without another thought.

The only way for you to ensure that you are using it is to take it out every week as you plan and treat it like a living breathing document that must be constantly edited and updated.

For weekly planning, I love using Planbook.com. The first year of using Planbook can be a little time-consuming as you set the template to match your preferences. After the first year though, lesson planning is a breeze!

You can extend lessons, bump them to another date, and even copy a whole year! It’s a web-based program that allows you to share your lessons with fellow teachers and administrators.

My school pays for Planbook for us, but I would gladly pay for it on my own. It’s currently only $15 for the year and well worth it! (Planbook isn’t paying me, I just really love it : ) I take out my curriculum plan and quickly enter in and elaborate on the things that I previously planned on my calendar within Planbook.

Having the curriculum plan also helps me to see if my pacing is correct. I can see if I need to speed things up or slow them down when my students aren’t grasping a concept. It lets me know if I am going to hit all my standards, and how thoroughly I’ve covered them.

Not to keep going on about Planbook, but they also have an awesome feature that allows you to add standards to each lesson. This is SUPER helpful at the end of the year to see which standards you have covered, and how often you touched upon them.

Curriculum Planning Calendar

To make things easy on myself I created a curriculum planning calendar that is simple and clear to use. It’s 100% editable, in both a PowerPoint form and as a Google Drive template. It’s updated yearly with the new dates so once you make a purchase, you get those updates free for life!

If you would like to take a look at my curriculum planning resource just click on the link below:

Curriculum Planning Calendar

Let me know in the comments if you’ve used something like this before, and if you have any tips or tricks that you would like to share!

Share it:
Email
Facebook
Pinterest
Twitter

You might also like...

​.custom-link { cursor: pointer !important; }