Getting Organized

As I said in my last post, I needed to take a few steps back and begin at the beginning with my planning.  That's exactly what I did and here's what it looks like.  I should explain first that my vision for this year is to divide my 80 minute classes into 4 blocks:  20 minutes of stations, 20 minutes of whole group instruction, 20 minutes of project time, and 20 minutes of writing.  To make this work, I have to be super organized.  I am working to have sheets like this for each of the new-to-me standards I will teach this year.  I keep them in my lesson plan binder for quick reference.

The daily project time will be my core differentiation time.  Most projects will integrate technology and I wanted to go ahead and consider higher-order thinking as I outlined ideas.  With all of the Common Core's focus on writing, I also wanted to "begin with the end in mind" and consider ways to include narrative, informative, and argumentative writing.

This is all far from finished and a very rough draft still of what will turn into my lesson plans and then what I teach, but I love having things in one place.  Otherwise when the time comes to teach a standard, I run around to my filing cabinet, files on my computer, Discovery Education for videos, finding those online games, pinterest ideas, etc.  Even though I haven't gotten to put this into practice for 3rd grade, I did the same thing for Kindergarten and it was wonderful!