A few years ago, my district didn’t have a set week to week list of things that we had to teach. My coworkers and I met during the summer to plan out our entire year. It was the best thing we ever did to make teaching during the year just a tad bit less stressful.
How to get started on a Curriculum Map
First, decide what columns (subjects/topics) you need on your curriculum map. Some ideas are sight words, letters, numbers, writing skill, phonemic awareness skill, math skill, and possibly the theme you’re teaching that week. Grab your standards and any books that you have to teach from. Another wonderful column to have would be books. Every year, I forget the wonderful books that I read a certain week or during a theme. You could list any potential books during that week.
From there, start plugging in areas that you know for sure you want to teach certain things there. I also like to add a column for crafts/random ideas to put in things like field trips, guest visitors to our classroom and other ideas that should be remembered for that week. These aren’t necessarily needed to lesson plan, but I like to have it filled in so I can remember if I need to plan something beforehand for it. This helps if I need to send out letters to parents requesting for food or supplies to help with an activity.
Platform for Creating Curriculum Map
You can use any typing software that you’re comfortable with. My go to’s are either PowerPoint or a Google Doc on Google Drive. PowerPoint is really user friendly with moving things around, adding images and so on. A Google Doc is extremely easy if you’re working with your team or someone else. You can all type on the same document at the same time to save time.
As you’re all discussing, looking through standards and your teacher guides, one or two people can be typing as the rest of you talk. This helps the process go a lot more quickly than if you’re working alone or working at separate times to fill in the calendar.
Take a Break and Come Back to It!
It may take you more than one work period to get this calendar filled in and that’s okay! You may think of a different way to introduce a skill or want to move things around. This is perfectly fine because as you know lesson plans are changed all the time. This is the same for a curriculum map. However, you will need to try to stick to whatever you decide because you only have so many weeks to get everything taught.
Grab your FREE Editable Curriculum Map (Pacing Guide)
I created the table for you in both PowerPoint and Google Slides to help get you started. If you need to add any extra columns, feel free to do so. I stopped at 36 weeks since we have 4 nine weeks and that’s all that I need. Grab your FREE Pacing Guide here or click the image below.
