Year-Long Plan

Start with a solid backbone

Hello Busy Bee community! Today’s blog is a repost from last summer, in which I explain about how I get started with my year-long plan. I like to work on this over summer break before the school year even starts; continue with it as the school year unfolds; and, reflect and make changes every spring and summer. A year-long plan is a dynamic document that grows and changes in an ongoing cycle.

I am deviating slightly from my summer blogging schedule, skipping for now a planned post on whole group phonics and phonemic awareness and jumping ahead to this topic. I will return to the formerly planned post when I can give it the proper attention it demands, including alphabet picture cards and phonemic awareness word lists, which will be available free to anyone with a paid subscription.

---

What is a year-long plan?

Each teacher’s year-long plan will look different, depending on how it is written and the extent of its detail. I define a year-long plan as a scope and sequence for all components of your kindergarten instruction. It starts with a solid backbone and is a place to make sure all the little (but priceless!) details of an effective kindergarten program have a place to land, to be recorded and not forgotten. It allows you to think ahead on questions like how might my whole group phonics instruction mesh together with my read alouds, my writing activities, what I am teaching in math, how I can integrate the science curriculum, art, and other fun activities.

I’m sure you can think of examples of “I really like to have the kids do this activity after I read this book” or “The Science curriculum says we should plant seeds in November, but I want to do it in the spring” or “I plan on teaching long vowels in January because if I do it before middle-of-the-year DIBELS testing students tend to use more long vowels in CVC words than they might otherwise” or “It makes sense to teach managing impulsivity prior to teaching striving for accuracy.” A year-long plan provides a great visual on how your year of teaching will unfold and progress.

What are the benefits of year-long planning?

A year-long plan is helpful in many ways as it serves to:

• warehouse all your teaching ideas, lessons, and activities for the sake of building up your programming as the year(s) go on

• act as a living document, allowing you to revise and add to the plan as you go

• make lesson planning easier and faster

• streamline materials creation, collection, and organization

• keep instruction moving along at a steady pace

• build in intentional connections and progressions for your students

• lessen spontaneous and haphazard teaching, as you know that certain lessons and activities appear at strategic locations in the year-long plan

• unite grade level partners and promote consistency in instruction and pacing across the grade level

• share current and upcoming teaching topics with your aide, the librarian, art teacher, music teacher, and others who work with your students

• ensure intentionality with sequencing of instruction and activities and the integration of them to enhance student understanding and learning.

It sounds overwhelming; how do I start?

Year-long plans can become quite detailed and multi-page in length. Of course, they all start off small, so visualize a one-pager as you attempt to get started. This one page will become the backbone of your year-long plan. Having the backbone in place will allow you to add, remove, or modify the placement of instructional activities and other details as you go along as well as more quickly see where certain units, lessons, and activities best fit in.

For my teammates and me, the backbone of the plan is weekly themes. For other kindergarten teachers, it might be seasons and holidays, a reading program that has thematic elements, a phonics scope and sequence that lends itself well to incorporating related activities, a progression based on the standards, or perhaps the science and social studies curriculums. Our math program’s calendar grid has some fun monthly themes that we could build off of as well (and do in part).

A sample year-long plan backbone based on weekly themes

As I mentioned, my kindergarten year is based on weekly themes. I have been doing this for several years, but every spring my teammate and I review the themes and their placement and talk about changing some of them up based on new books we come across, newly-acquired curriculum, or other concepts we want our students to learn. Since we do weekly themes, our year-long plan is based on weeks. Yours could be based on quarters, months, or varying lengths of time depending on what you are using as a backbone. This is my one-page year-long plan backbone from which all other planning will stem (shown is the first date of each week, the number of school days in that week, and the weekly theme).

---

What I like about building the backbone with weekly themes is that each topic is important and engaging for the age I teach. More important, however, is that this approach builds background knowledge, vocabulary, and concepts within each theme as well as upon each theme. For example, with the Little Red Hen we learn the concept of word—red is always spelled r-e-d. We learn about characters, we learn about setting, we learn about different versions of a story, and we learn about kindness. The next week, when we study apple trees, we learn more about the concept of word as the children see the permanence of the letter order in red, green, and yellow. We also begin our appreciation of nature. In the spring, there are several themes that build up this appreciation of nature and also the understanding that nature can be cruel at times. Because I have been using weekly themes for many, many years, I know the value of each theme on its own as well as the order and interrelatedness of the themes.

I must say that the weekly themes I use were originally chosen based on read aloud books that I owned and had collected. When you are first starting out in this career, you may not own very many read aloud books. Your year-long plan can assist greatly in buying only books you will use and/or asking the school librarian to pull books that relate to a weekly theme. Of course, you can find books online read by other people; but, I caution against this as there is nothing as valuable as you, the teacher, reading an actual book to your students and pausing and talking at all the crucial moments.

When I look at the backbone for my year-long plan, I see so many possibilities to keep building the plan out. I immediately want to plug in read alouds for each weekly theme, see how my phonics scope and sequence falls into line, determine where science units will align, plug in the perfect brain breaks, think about how I can slightly tweak the math program to enhance each weekly theme, write decodable passages with related topics, plan writing activities, and start searching for arts and crafts and other related activities. There is so much more to add as well, but the point is to build your backbone any way you can and then add to it when you have time and ideas.

Over the years, you will find that this year-long plan backbone is invaluable for highly effective teaching and saving time with lesson planning and material creating and collection. Plus, when you love your year-long plan, you will love going to work and implementing it. Trust me.

Randee

---

This post is going out to everyone—those with a paid subscription who receive all of my content (and materials!) and those who opt for the free subscription and receive only occasional posts. Please share this post with any kindergarten teachers you know (or first grade, for that matter) and please consider a paid subscription to Busy Bee Kindergarten to get in on all the summer planning posts coming your way. I appreciate your support and your interest in learning more about how better to teach our nascent readers and writers.