Planning for the Year Ahead

Many of us teachers are enjoying our summer holidays and taking it easy. However, this is a great opportunity to plan and organize for the coming year. With lots of curriculum to cover and our busy lives keeping on track is often hard to do. I like to have my long-range plans pre-planned before the school year starts. My long-range plans are a working document however it is very important to keep me on track. This is also very important if you are like me and teach split grades. With double the curriculum, it is important to plan out how the two grades interrelate so that you can combine teaching as much as possible.

Last year I taught a 3/4 split and used my long-range plans to keep me on track and focused throughout the year. I was able to stay mostly on track throughout the year, with December and June being tough months to get through the curriculum. Below is a copy of my long-range plans for you to look at! Language is not included in this as we planned our language in 6 week cycles as a team.

3/4 Long Range Plans for Ontario - Digital and Fully Editable

This year I am busy working on my long-range plans for the coming year. I am now teaching a 4/5 split so some of the information will stay the same but most will not. About three-quarters of my students are the same so I will need to use new materials especially in Language, PE, and some Math.

As with everything I change up the layout of my long-range plans. This time I have included my language instruction into my planning. I will also combine my arts into my language instruction. Click the image below to be taken to my plans!

Recently I have noticed many teachers on my Facebook groups looking for how to structure a Daily 5 Literacy block of time and what a day looks like. Here is a sample of my daily plans from last year. This is similar to what I use this year except that I use a digital playbook through www.planboardapp.com.

Sample Daily Plans

Additionally I needed a way to keep the students focused, on task, and accountable during Daily 5 so The had to fill this out weekly to track what they were going to do.

Sample Daily 5 Schedule for Students with Activity Log

For those teachers teaching junior check out my Be a Star goal board. This goal board combines reading and writing goals onto one board (awesome because I never have the space for two boards)