Backwards Planning Resources for First Year Teachers
One of the first and most important tasks that elementary teachers undertake at the start of the school year, is the creation of instructional calendars. These calendars serve as roadmaps for the entire school year, outlining the specific topics and skills that will be covered each month. The development of instructional calendars is a time-consuming process that requires careful planning and consideration of numerous factors.
Of course when I was a first year teacher I assumed all I had to do was create weekly lesson plans. I didn’t realize I’d be spending days meeting with my grade level team putting together these instructional calendars. This is a huge part of the backwards planning process, which is how we make sure all of the required topics and skills are taught before the end of the school year, while also allowing sufficient time for review and practice.
Did I mention our lessons often don’t go according to plan and students don’t always master skills right away? In math, there is so much content to cover that these roadmaps leave us no room to learn from and improve on our lessons. We just keep chugging along, frantically trying to catch students up during small groups. The pressure teachers face to execute a lesson perfectly on the first try is tremendous.
In this blog post I’m sharing the steps included for backwards planning, and resources to help you eliminate a good portion of the workload involved. Let’s jump right in!
Steps for backwards planning
It usually goes something like this:
List the general topics that need to be taught and the order in which they should be taught
Include the standards to be covered for each topic
Determine the number of days dedicated to direct instruction
Unpack each standard and determine how you will teach the content
Create weekly lesson plans
Scope and sequence for 2nd grade math and 3rd grade math:
My scope and sequence has been designed to leave teachers plenty of time to incorporate technology programs, projects, review days, assessments, field trips, etc. In other words, if you follow this general timeline, you will not fall behind even if your school has specific requirements that other schools do not have.
Step number four, unpacking the standards, is by far the most time-consuming. For first year teachers, this is the process of deciding how we will teach the content. Yikes! Where do we even begin? A lot of times the teacher edition textbooks are a good starting place. They offer lesson ideas for whole group instruction, activities, worksheets and games. However, we then have to prepare the materials for each of those things. Yikes again!
If you are in need of easy to use math lessons, please check out my TPT store! I used these lessons for my whole group instruction, and my students absolutely loved them! Not only that, since they are powerpoint presentations, all you have to do is grab the topic you need and teach! No prep work required!
So let’s revisit that to-do list:
List the general topics that need to be taught and the order in which they should be taught
Include the standards to be covered for each topic
Determine the number of days dedicated to direct instruction
Unpack each standard and determine how you will teach the content
Create weekly lesson plans
Looks like you are ready to create your weekly lesson plans!
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