Long Term Planning
Literacy
My curriculum follows the Wonders literacy system. Our year is divided into four units. There are between 5 and 7 cycles for each unit. Each unit focuses on an essential question. Each cycles within the unit has a guiding question that ties into the essential question. The units’ essential questions are: “How are things special?” “What makes a community?” “What changes over time?” and “How do animals live in our world?” My school places a significant emphasis on collaboration. Before the start of every quarter, we are given a day out of the classroom to work as a team and pace out the coming quarter's literacy instruction. We do this in a grid that I then use to create my lesson plans. This collaborative effort allows us to discuss and review the sequencing of lessons, as well as share ideas and resources with the team. The ESOL teacher dedicated to our grade is present at this meeting to provide her specialized expertise as we plan. This also ensures she is able to support our Emergent Bilingual Students with the work we are focusing on in the classroom during her pull-out times.
The reading curriculum is divided into four units. When we long term plan, we think about the skills we need our students to have by the end of the year. To ensure the skills taught are scaffolded in a logical way to support student learning. We met as a first grade team to write out all of the phonic skills Wonders has us teach during the year. We then regrouped the skills based on units to build on foundational skills. The picture shown here is the result of this meeting. We use this guide to outline our units. The unit plans then guide the weekly and daily lesson plans.
Math
In order to ensure my students master the first grade standards by the end of the academic year, it is vital that I start the year with a clear understanding of when and how I am going to teach each standard. The year long math plan linked below shows how I identified the standards I would target in each of the units I would teach during the year. I then broke down each standard into learning objectives that clearly stated what students should be able to do by the conclusion of the unit. This was a helpful tool that allowed me to plan each unit with the end of year goal in mind. The long term plan also outlined what foundational skills students needed to have mastered in order to fully participate in the current unit's learning. This was especially helpful as I considered any remediation necessary before continuing onto the next unit. An example of a backward's planned unit plan can be found on the Unit Planning page of this site.
This year, the county changed the math curriculum. It is divided into 11 units based on standard. When we analyzed the sequencing of these units, we noticed they were done done in a way that did not support student learning. The sequence did not establish a strong foundation of skills before leading into more complicated tasks. As a result, the first grade team decided to reorganize the math units. We started with basic number sense from 1 - 120. This skill is expected to be mastered by the end of kindergarten, and is expected to be a review for students and foundation on which to build math skills. During quarterly planning, we work as a team to decide how long we will teach each skill for. This helps us pace out each of the units throughout the quarters and ensure we are able to teach all standards by the end of the year. We use the standards assigned by the county to create the units, and then match our lessons to the important skills aligned to each standards. We do this as a team to ensure all of our students have access to all the strengths presented on our first grade team. While this is an important outline, we are also all expected to make adjustments as necessary for our students. If I notice my students need additional lessons on a certain skill, I may fall behind on the grid to ensure they have the standard mastered. I will still follow the progression of the learning, but may do so on a different timeline. The link below shows the standards we focus on in first grade and how they have been grouped together to create our math units, and the progression we follow in our planning.