I became addicted to this style of planning after discovering it on a few blogs while I was searching for a blog template. I don't think I could do this every week (a la the Visual Lesson Plan) but I did know I wanted to sketch out my school year this way. I'm a visual person and this just makes me happy. I can process everything that needs to be covered at a glance.
What the heck is a "visual lesson plan"? It's a "visual" representation of the weeks lessons. Take a look at the one in this blog post from the Queen of Visual Lesson plans, Mrs. Willis. Most of the ones you will find online feature the covers of products/books being used for the week as well as various clip art.
After I saw a few on Pinterest and discovered what they were called I Googled the term - WHOA! Some plans are amazingly complex and some super simple. I was most interested in how people made them. They look like they are made in Microsoft Word but no, people use PowerPoint. I learned all about how it's done from this fab post on Mrs. Willis' Kindergarten blog.
I use Keynote to create my visual curriculum maps. I know a lot of people use PowerPoint but I don't have a copy of that. I also love how easy Keynote makes lining things up.
I have three pages per grade, per month for each quarter. Today I'm giving you a peek at August for 3rd Grade. First up is the "Lesson Focus" Page.
Lesson focus is all about the "Big Topics" I want to cover for the month. As you can see August is all about EasyTech and reviewing iPad basics.
As I create these I have been working on being comfortable with having "white space" on the page. Am I working on Word Processing in August with 3rd Grade? Nope. And I'm I okay with that.
Next up is the website page.
Here I'll place sites and games I want to be sure to have the kids work on. I put the graphic from the games they can use up on my ActivBoard. This way they have a choice but I still get to direct their selection. This way also makes them try lots of different games and not the same four.
Last up is the App page.
I want to cover more apps as a group and start an "app review" board in my lab. I just have to figure out what I want it to look like and how it's going to work across grade levels.
Are you starting to map out next year? Do you use curriculum maps to see the big picture?
Next up is the website page.
Here I'll place sites and games I want to be sure to have the kids work on. I put the graphic from the games they can use up on my ActivBoard. This way they have a choice but I still get to direct their selection. This way also makes them try lots of different games and not the same four.
Last up is the App page.
I want to cover more apps as a group and start an "app review" board in my lab. I just have to figure out what I want it to look like and how it's going to work across grade levels.
Are you starting to map out next year? Do you use curriculum maps to see the big picture?
No comments:
Post a Comment