Pre-Planning Days

Hey guys!

It’s Sunday!

I just wanted to give a little view into how this week has gone. So, this week the second-grade team (there are 6 of us) came together at the school to do some pre, pre-planning. This year the district has created PowerPoints for not only Math but also ELA (English Language Arts) and Science. Unfortunately, we still must create Social Studies and Health PowerPoints out of thin air. And I know what you’re thinking. “PowerPoints for second graders? Really?” Yes we use PowerPoint in all grades including Kindergarten. This helps for students who are visual learners and I found it to be a better way to show lesson plans.

In college we were taught a certain way to create lesson plans. We were taught to list everything we were doing in the lesson including materials, objectives, details of everything you were going to do within that lesson. Now… we do this to an extent. I’m going to explain how we go about planning our lessons and what we focus on. If at any time you find something in here that is helpful or you have another idea you would like to share, please leave a comment below. Let’s get to it then.

We come together as a team and focus on the standards we will be focusing on for the beginning of the year. We all work together to deconstruct the standards. To do this we use a form that lists everything we need to know about the standard. Here is a step-by-step of deconstructing the standard.

1. Locate a standard you will focus on (some units have 6 standards so you will have to go through each one individually).
2. Write the standard completely.
3. Go through the standard and look for the verbs and noun.
1. What will the students be doing but also how will the students be doing the skill?
4. Make sure to look at what the students learned in the previous grade. Sometimes they may not have learned the skill at all so it will be completely new to them. This is to help you know where to start.
5. Go into the next grade level. What will they focus on next year? A lot of the time in Science students learn something and then they don’t see it again until two grade levels later.
6. With all this information you can now think about what you should see and hear students doing. In schools we want to hear students working together, we want to hear students collaborating. Maybe in Math you want to see students using whiteboards or manipulatives. Make sure you have that written down.
7. Think about the materials you’re going to use to teach this standard. If the standard calls for students to show understanding of equal groups, you might want to use manipulatives to teach that skill. Hands on is extremely important. I am a kinetic learner myself and need to have it in front of me to understand the skill.
8. Finally, you can create your daily target and learning goal. They are usually similar but still different. Make sure you say what the students will be doing in the target. If they are going to be using manipulatives, then put it in there. Pick one part of the standard for a day if it is something new for the students. You don’t want to throw too much at them in one day.

When we finish deconstructing the standards, we have a better insight to what the students SHOULD be doing and what us as teachers SHOULD be teaching them.\

This week we spent an entire day of just deconstructing the standards and going over them as a team. We were all able to be on the same page. Once we have that done, we can get into the planning part. So, as I mentioned earlier the district has supplied PowerPoints (lesson plans). We take the information from when we deconstructed the standards and then edit PowerPoints to fit our students learning. There are some areas where we split one day into two or combine two days because they are so short. Our school gives us 50 minutes for Science, when we looked at the plans, we were able to combine days and split days to make it better fit our 50-minute block for the subject. By the end of pre-planning we have been able to get the first units completed for the school year.

Here is an example of when we deconstructed the standard for a second grade Math standard:

1.  MAFS.2.NBT.1.3
1. Read and write numbers to 1000 using base-ten numerals, number names, and expanded form.
2. Verbs: Read, Write
3. Nouns: numbers, number names, expanded form, base-ten numerals, 1000
4. Students only learned to read, write, and count to 120 in 1^st grade.
5. Students will begin multiplying whole numbers by multiples of 10 in 3^rd grade.
6. See:
1. Students writing 120 as 100+20+0=120 in expanded form.
2. Writing 100 as one hundred.
7. Hear:
1. Students reading numbers in expanded form.
2. Reading numbers, counting to 1000.
8. Materials: White boards, paper, pencil, markers, maybe some manipulatives.
9. Daily target: I can read and write numbers to 1000 using expanded form. (because this is the first time, they are seeing this we will only be focusing on this skill for the days lesson.)
10. Learning goal: Students will read and write numbers to 1000 using base-ten numerals, number names, and expanded form.

Whenever you are planning lessons for your students, whether they are young like my second graders or 12^th graders, make it fun and interesting. Remember students can’t learn if they are bored. We use a lot of movement, music, and collaboration in our lessons.

I hope this helps some new teachers out there wondering how they are going to get through the year if they are struggling with planning. You will get through this. The first year is always the hardest but you will be changing many lives this year.

YOU GOT THIS!!

Cheers!