KAITLIN BARNES
LONG-TERM PLANNING
Because I am responsible for teaching so many TEKS, it is crucial that I have a long-term plan for teaching and reviewing these learning standards with my students. Having a plan mapped out of what I am going to teach and when makes it much easier to plan for specific activities during the school year. In addition, my students take the state standardized reading test at the beginning of April. This shortened timeline means that I need to ensure that I have a schedule that guides when I am going to cover all of the required standards and that includes time to reteach and review the topics that students will inevitably struggle with.
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I start my long-term planning by reflecting on what worked well during the previous school year. By thinking about the order in which I taught the TEKS last year, I am able to develop an appropriate sequencing of learning experiences for this school year. For example, this past year, I realized that my students were much more successful with plot when we had just recently finished reading a class novel together. Having a complex mentor text that we could use as a model made it easier for students to apply their learning to their independent reading books. This year, when I was planning when to teach plot, I made sure to include it just after we finish our first class novel, Zane and the Hurricane. I also reflect on what activities worked well for each standard. For example, my students really enjoyed writing an acrostic poem about their characters during our study of character traits, so I made a note in my long-term plan to repeat that activity this year. Not every topic has an activity paired with it in my long-term plan--most of those activities are added when I am putting my unit and weekly plans together.
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After reflecting on the previous year's successes and failures, I consult the scope and sequence documents that my school district provides. By doing so, I gain a better understanding of the reading, writing, and social studies content standards. Although I do not strictly follow the pacing calendar that our school district provides, these documents also help me see the suggested order in which to teach the content standards. Ensuring that I am roughly aligned to the district calendar will help me prepare my students for the district-created snapshot assessments in each subject.
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I also consult my district's academic calendar and testing calendar when putting together my long-term plans. This helps me take into account school holidays, district assessments, and state assessments so that I can be realistic when planning how long each topic will take me to teach. Additionally, I plan time to reteach and review topics before the state test in April, and I am planning to have a project-based learning unit after the test to keep students engaged in learning until the very end of the school year.
This year, my school district lost over two weeks of instructional time at the beginning of the school year due to Hurricane Harvey. While I did not edit the dates in my long-term plan, I did push everything back by two weeks in my unit plans and weekly plans.
My long-term plans include my skill of the week, read aloud, book club plans, and assessment plans for my reading block. These plans also include the writing activities that I incorporate into my reading block, and the plans for my Social Studies block. By including writing and social studies on the same page as the reading plan, I am able to take a cross-disciplinary view of my instruction and start identifying ways to incorporate reading and writing skills into social studies, and vice versa.
One activity that worked well for my students the previous year was creating a theme graphic organizer to help students identify the theme of their book and provide specific text evidence to support their thinking. Based on this prior knowledge and experience, I made sure to include this activity when putting together my long-term plans for this school year.
This student was able to correctly identify the theme of her independent reading book and provide specific examples of loyalty from the text.
This student, who receives special education services, is reading at a second-grade level and writing at a first-grade level. Although he was not able to adequately articulate his evidence in writing, he was able to explain his thoughts orally and I took that into consideration as part of his special education accommodations.
Another activity that I was sure to incorporate into my long-term plans was character acrostic poems. Last year, my students completed these towards the end of the year, but I wanted to include them in my plans earlier this year because they were such a good way to assess a student's understanding of both character traits and finding text evidence to support those traits. My prior knowledge of this learning experience and content standard helped me adjust my plans in a way that met student learning needs and kept them engaged.
This student chose to complete the acrostic poem using our class novel and showed a good understanding of each of her chosen traits. She could have enhanced her work by explaining the evidence in her own words, in addition to just providing the direct quotations.
This student still receives ESL services and was able to select specific text evidence to support each of her chosen traits. She explained two of the traits in her own words but did not extend that to the rest of her poem.