At this point every year, I begin to reflect on my units and think about what next year might look like. Which units worked well? Which units need to be tweaked? Which units need to be tossed entirely? Do my units need to be rearranged? Where should my focus go this summer (other than the beach, haha)? All of those decisions are reflected in my curriculum map, and I wanted to share my decision-making process with you. I wish someone had set everything out this way for me!
As a new teacher, I didn’t use a curriculum map. My first year, I followed the other teachers in my grade level and mostly moved through the basal. It was safe, met the standards, and provided me lots of support as a new teacher. During my first year, however, I also attending a series of professional development courses on reading and writing workshops. Our school began trying those ideas, and I started noticing more growth in my students as a result.
In my third year teaching, I decided to throw out the basal map, most of the workbook pages, and the spelling program too. I’ve received tons of questions about this and know I know it can be an overwhelming process, so I hope this helps.
I kept any stories from the basal that I felt were truly quality stories. They were the ones that were well-written, engaging, and most loved by my students the year before. I did the same with the leveled readers that came with the textbook. Lots of them went out the window. This meant I needed more guided reading books. I went into the old textbook adoption materials and pulled out more leveled readers. I picked through them the same way. I also went into our school book room and organized it by genre (yes, myself while I had a student teacher). The books were already sorted by level, so I only had to regroup them by genre and make little shelf labels. In the process, I noted favorite books that I wanted to use in addition to leveled readers. I played nice and left them in the book room (ahem, that’s the way book rooms work people you can’t use the same books all year so please share them). When I finished that process, I had the bulk of my reading material.
Now what do you do with all of those books? I took the reading material and sorted it by genre. This meant breaking up basal stories and their assigned leveled readers. Then I pieced everything back together into my monthly units. Instead of following the basal themes, I was now following my own curriculum map. It just made more sense to me to teach this way.
My last step was to start pulling and creating materials for minilessons within each unit. This part changes from year to year depending on my class, but I’ve created binders to organize myself. Now when I’m looking for inferring lesson, I have a whole toolbox of them. I’ll share more on the specifics of the binders later, but for now I want to let the idea of creating your own curriculum map set in.
Here are some of my documents so you can see my thought process. This is my first attempt with sheets for reading, writing, and word study. I obviously didn’t only teach the strategies and skills for one month, but the months listed were the ones where I knew I needed to hit those skills heavily. I was still using the basal map more than I wanted to and some classes needed different skills at different times. I was glad I had all of the materials organized into binders, but I needed to be less rigid with my map. I tossed out that part of my map and tried again.
This is my current version. It’s actually copied from my lesson plan book so you can see the specific stories I taught for whole-class reading as well as my colored guided reading groups. It also lists my writing, science, and social studies units. It makes long-term planning so much easier! I’ll be back to share my binders just as soon as I can get pictures together for you. Until then, I encourage you to create something like this for yourself if you don’t already have it.
WOW! What a great way to organize your year. Thanks for sharing.
Your newest follower,
Kristi
http://learnings-a-hoot.blogspot.com
Thank you for sharing this! I'm going into my 4th year of teaching, and this is what I need to be focusing on. I will have the reading specialist working with me this year, and this will be great to start with her help!
This is wonderful! Especially because I am going into my first year to teaching, this is going to be very, VERY helpful! I was trying to open the first link, but I couldn't get it to open. Would you be able to send it to me? I am very intrigued to see it!
Thank you SO much!
msyoshida@yahoo.com
I changed it to an older version of Excel and updated the link. It should go now. Thanks for letting me know! http://www.msfultz.com/originalfultzmap.xls
I soo need to do this. I'm going in to my fourth year of teaching and realize more and more how beneficial it would be to teach this way (as opposed to following the basal). We are using Harcourt Trophies, but are up for a reading adoption after this year. Thanks for sharing your map! This will be very helpful! 🙂
Jessica
Mrs. Heeren's Happenings
This is very interesting as I am a 3rd grade teacher who also uses Treasures. I have taught many grade levels, but landed in 3rd for the first time. We recently decided on what standards we are going to cover each unit, but some of them were a stretch based on the units. What a good idea to "rearrange" the stories to better fit together and throw out the ones that weren't very interesting. I am curious, if you use the Common Core Standards, what author(s) do you choose to do an author study? I have one mini unit using Jan Brett, but wonder if you have found any tie ins using any Treasures stories. Thanks. Monica Horn mhorn@adrianschool.com
WOW! Thank you for sharing your process. I really NEED to do this over the summer. I want to have everything planned out so I know that I've covered everything. Thank you!
Amy
Where Seconds Count 2nd grade blog
I just found your site today and I LOVE your curriculum map / guide. I teach 3rd grade and I think I am going to steal a few of your ideas. 🙂 Thank you so much for sharing!
Denise G.
Christi~ Thanks so much for sharing! We are creating our curriculum map right now and yours will be very helpful. I especially appreciate the mentor texts listed!
Thanks! Steph