Year Long Plans… CHECK!
HAPPY DANCE TIME!
If you are a teacher that wants to teach EVERY standard EVERY year, you have hit the jackpot!
Our year long plans are done for the YEAR and we can say without a doubt that we will teach every standard every year with this formula! Yes, you heard that right! The YEAR and EVERY STANDARD! We would like to share the process with you to hopefully give you some tips that can make your year sail as smoothly as ours will! Everyone has requirements from districts of standards that MUST be taught… but how do you know you are really hitting every standard to mastery?
How Do We Plan?
We have decided that the best way to break down the standards is into 7 domains. The seven domains that work for us are: Genre (RL 10), Key Ideas and Details (RL1-3), Craft and Structure AND Integration of Knowledge and Ideas merged (RL 4-9), Language (L1-3), Vocabulary (L4-6), Nonfiction (RI 1-9) and Writing.
We start by filling in what our district requires us to teach with each unit of study. Then, we look to the supporting standards and other concepts that we think would deepen our students’ understanding of the priority standards. As you can see, our district’s requirements are in red. Everything in black is a “supporting standard.” Look at how much our students would have missed if we just followed our pacing guide! It’s crazy, right?!!!!!!!
Also, when we plug in each standard, we look at what combinations would be best for each book. For example, when we are doing our mystery unit with Bunnicula, we know that James Howe does an amazing job with quotes and speech tags in dialogue. Character Traits are perfect for Chester, Bunnicula and Harold. Context Clues are perfect for “investigating” in mysteries. Each year, we perfect our order a bit more and tailor them to each book when possible!
We Teach EVERY Standard EVERY Year!
We can guarantee that we teach EVERY standard every year! It is an amazing feeling to have. We can say WITH CONFIDENCE that we are doing what we need to do in order to cover our standards!!!!
We would also LOVE to hear your feedback and give any tips you have for your year long plans!!!!
UPDATE!
Every year, we update our plan and perfect it. Check out our latest plan below!
As you can see, not much has changed. We’ve added some new books and changed the order of some standards. We can definitely say that once you have made your year long plan for one year, every year after is that much easier!
13 Comments
Do you sell this template anywhere? I haven’t been able to find it and was just wondering
No, I’m sorry, we don’t
Could you make it so I can download this template and edit it?
How do you make sure that everything is taught before testing, the second week of April, if some standards aren’t taught until May?
If you look at the standards we focus on in May, they are kind of what we like to call “Bonus Standards.” We can talk about them in months before in mini lessons so that the students are familiar with the terminology, but they are not standards that get a large amount of attention on the state tests. Again, we might teach them as mini lessons before the state test.
What grade is this geared towards? 4th?
Yes
Are you willing to share the template or consider putting on TpT?
I love your plan! I noticed your Language focus is set up monthly. Does that mean you focus on that same language standard for the entire month? I do Mentor Sentences with picture books weekly. I’m wondering how I could incorporate that into something like this…
Hello! Yes, our Language Standard is for the month. You could definitely still use picture books weekly. You could focus on one language standard all month and also spiral back to previous standards on a weekly basis to give some variety! For example, I could focus on punctuating dialogue all month long in each picture book, but I could also spiral back to capitalization, complete sentences and compound sentences! Hope this helps! We love using Mentor Texts to focus on each standard!
I teach 5th grade but have lower students. I see that you teach fiction and nonfiction at the same time. Is this correct?
Hello! Yes, you are correct. We teach the nonfiction standard with our History/ Science times.
Hello-
I love all of your organization and plans for the year. You teach so many Reading Standards. Your students really enjoy your teaching.