Wednesday, June 27, 2012

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)

  • 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...

12 comments:

  1. Very cute! What program do you use to create your documents and where did you find that cute chevron pattern? I love it!

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    1. Thank you! I use Microsoft Word to create the majority of my documents. Isn't that chevron fabulous? It was a free download here: http://melstampz.blogspot.com/2012/02/new-bright-patterned-papers-chevron.html. The site gives you a set of directions for downloading. Thank you for reading!

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  2. I am spending this hot, hot day (100 degrees by noon in the N. Ga Mtns.) staying cool in the AC and blog stalking. I just found yours and love, love, LOVE the ideas. Thanks for all of your great posts. I can't wait to read more.

    I'm your newest follower.

    Cynthia
    2nd Grade Pad

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  3. I just found you through Pinterest as I was searching for calendars. I love, love, love your blog and am your newest follower. Thank you for sharing this, it's awesome. :)

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  4. I really appreciate you sharing this, especially as an editable file! (Here's my teacher blogger blasphemy- don't like the font Wish I Was Taller, even though everyone else does!) Can't wait to use this to help me iron out my year-long planning. Thank you SO much! :)

    Jenny
    Luckeyfrog's Lilypad

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  5. This is so wonderful of you to share! Thank you so much!
    Judy

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  6. Thank you so much for sharing!
    Dana
    a2ndgradeadventure.blogspot.com

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  7. Wow! These are great! I only wish I had found it sooner!
    Marie

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  8. Thank you so much. I have trying to make one of my own for weeks now with no such luck.
    Tammy

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  9. Are you still using this and do you have a current one for 2017-2018

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