Summer is your time to soak up some sun, read some books, sleep in, and recharge. I don’t want you to waste that precious time planning for next year. That’s why I always share my planning process and tools with you for free so you can take your well deserved time off.
Before you begin planning, you need to know your standards and see if your school has a scope and sequence you need to follow. If they have this done for you, then you will just need to plug in the curriculum units to match what your school wants you to teach each week.
Let’s plan your whole year of science in 10 minutes or less!
Here are the 3 things you need:
#1 Your School Calendar
Look at the days and weeks your school will not be in session and mark those off on your calendar. Look at the state testing dates/windows for your grade level. You will want to plan to take those weeks off from actual lessons and use those weeks for testing and test prep. I also like to take the 2 weeks ahead of the test and plan fun test prep activities so I can review and work with small groups during that time. I make room in my calendar for test prep of other subjects, too, in case you want to do a grade level bootcamp or small group focus for each test. I also plan a week for each unit test. This gives me flexibility through the year if we get behind or need more time for small groups or reteach in each unit. This is a full week review otherwise which is lined out in the free planning guides mentioned below.
#2 Grab a FREE Planning Guide
I save all the planning guides I use for myself and other districts when I help them plan curriculum, so I have a variety of states and standards to share. You can find these in the preview download of most bundles in my store, and they are here on this website as free downloads. These planning guides can help you line out each standard, when and how it can be taught, and links to resources for teaching that standard. This website is also full of blog posts that take a look at lessons for each week of the school year.
#3 Your Curriculum Bundle
The last thing you need to have your whole year planned and ready to go is to have your full year curriculum on hand. Your school may provide that to some extent. But, I have my full year of science curriculum available for you so you can just print and teach! You can choose to add simple lab supplies or use the digital lessons for digital labs to go 100% NO PREP. Either way allows your students to see and experience each science standard in a real world way.
That’s all you need and your whole year is planned out for you! Watch me plan my whole year in just 3 minutes below! (It’s sped up so you can watch it happen in seconds.
Don’t worry, I also have a monthly planning tool that lines out what to do each day of the week so you don’t waste any time during the school year planning either.
That planning tool is coming next week!