My Attempt at Long Range Planning

Being awake constantly at night with a newborn has given me lots of hours to spend getting ideas from teaching blogs.  One of the coolest things I found was from Amanda over at TeachingMaddeness.  If you don't read her blog, you are missing out!  She was describing how she does her lesson plans by creating a long range plan for the entire year.  At first I thought that sounded impossible.  Then I started to think about how I will have a little one who I want to be able to come home to after school instead of spending evenings/weekends working all the time.  A long range plan seemed like the answer to my dreams. 

Fast forward to finally getting my keys back and being allowed into my room after maternity leave and I dove straight in!  I started by creating a document that had all of the dates we will be in school.  I then looked at all of the units/topics I wanted to hit with our new standards and plugged them in.  This took a LONG time and many revisions.  One thing that was sort of helpful is that our school is having us teach specific units in a specific order starting next year.  Not that they have any details for those units, more just titles and some of the standards we should hit in them.  Here is a picture of the first quarter. 



I would share mine, but it would just be a mess because it is a huge table with lots of merging as well as text boxes turned sideways to fit.

From there I followed her lead and created actual unit plans.  I broke each unit down into lessons and planned what I would teach for those lessons.  This has been most of my summer so far.  But I can happily say, I am done!  Now of course there are things I couldn't plan for, my CAFE strategy groups, individual meetings, etc.  However, the "meat" of my day is planned.  Here is what one of the units for reading looks like.  And yes...I know I haven't typed in all of the standards yet...


Of course I realize during the year there will be lots of tweaks.  Some things will work, some won't.  And of course it's Indiana...there will be snow.  That is why the lessons are called Lesson 1, Lesson 2, etc. and not specific days.  Flexible!  Now, Amanda puts all of her units into plastic containers to organize.  Well, I don't have the space or money for that.  However, I do have a huge filing cabinet!  I purged it at the beginning of the summer and designated drawers for subjects.  I then put master copies of anything I needed as well as any read-alouds I would need into the file folders themselves.  These are the math and reading drawers.  You will notice on the pictures I did end up having to double up on lessons per file folder for space.  (Also some books were too big to fit!)



I am beyond excited to try this out and see how much time it will save me for planning.  I am still going to use my daily/weekly lesson plans but write on them using my unit plans.  If you haven't, I would head over to Amanda's blog to get details on how she does this each year!  

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