keepin' it classy, curriculum style.

Prepare yourself. Blasphemy is about to slip from my lips: curriculum documents drive me nuts. Sorting through the endless tables, coded specifications, and learning progressions makes me want to pull my hair out. But, let's be honest, it's a necessary evil. As much as I would LOVE to teach my kids about daisies and butterflies all day, if I want to keep my job and mold well-rounded learners, I better be sure my instruction is tightly aligned with our state's specifications and district's curriculum. So how can I do that without having to weed through all of those curriculum documents each week? With this:

These documents could be used for a lesson plan book, but I created these to help our team stay organized and aligned with district curriculum next year. My plan is to spend the summer looking at all of our district's curriculum documents and condensing them down to these pages. I will break down each nine week's curriculum into a weekly table where I will list each content area's curriculum along with ideas for activities that I want to discuss with the team at our weekly planning meeting.

On the document, I also included a grayed-out section for us as a team to take notes during our planning meetings. The loopy box next to the year (which I found at Clip Art by Carrie www.ccteachfirst.blogspot.com) is where I will include notes and reminders for the team (i.e. professional development dates for the month, holidays, report card due dates, etc.).

My plan is to print these pages out in a booklet format so that I can bind these pages along with a couple other important school-wide documents and disperse these to each person on our team. Each week, we will use these documents to guide our discussion in our team planning meeting.

I have uploaded an editable Word document of the 2012-2013 curriculum calendar to my TPT store! This will allow you to edit and fill in the tables to match your district's curriculum. If you want your Word version to match mine, you will need the following fonts installed on your computer:

• Wish I Were Taller (www.kevinandamanda.com)
• Smiley Monster (www.kevinandamanda.com)
• Caitlin (http://reallyquitelucky.blogspot.com/p/fonts.html)

Click Here to Download the Curriculum Planning Calendars!

• These documents will keep our team organized and aligned with our district's curriculum.
• Rather than pulling up all of our district's curriculum documents on a weekly basis, we have all of the information from the documents in one, concise reference document.
• These documents also include a place to note the apps that we find that are tied to that week's curriculum.
• By including a space to include schedule-related notes (holidays, professional development dates, report card due dates, etc.), our team will stay informed and on-top of our extracurricular tasks.

Maybe those curriculum documents won't be so bad after all...