Year-Long Plan

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The first step in planning for an upcoming school year is to sketch out 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 next spring and summer. A year-long plan is a dynamic document that grows and changes in an ongoing cycle.

Now, not all teachers have a written year-long plan. If you are a new teacher or new to kindergarten, it might make sense to you to just start teaching and maybe make some notes as you go—what worked, what you’ll do differently next year, what your teammates did that you really liked or didn’t like so much, etc. Some personalities will operate with no plan whatsoever, just kind of wing it every week, day, minute. I, personally, cannot function like this and find it much less stressful when I have a plan in place and know where I’m headed and what the pace will be. Teaching with intention requires a plan.

Year-long planning is also housed in our weekly and daily lesson plans, especially if our written plans are detailed and we took notes and updated them as we went along and saved them to refer to the next school year.

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 curricula, art and other fun activities, etc.

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 just a one-page backbone for your year-long plan 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 was always our 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 was based on weekly themes. 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 an example of my one-page year-long plan backbone from which all other planning stemmed (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 and understanding of life cycles. 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 your year-long plan backbone is invaluable for saving time with lesson planning and material creating and collection. Not to mention intentional and highly effective teaching. Plus, when you love your year-long plan, you will love going to work and implementing it.

Paid Subscribers

You have access to my year-long plan folder, which houses a very detailed scope and sequence for phonics instruction throughout the day (with links to videos of each component happening in the classroom), a math year-long plan (brief, but remember that my plan is to put together a math curriculum for you this summer), a scope and sequence for writing skills, science lessons I incorporate into my year-long plan, and examples of goals I set for my instruction over the past two years.

Please connect with this group chat to comment, ask questions, and share your ideas on this topic. I know everyone will appreciate hearing from you (and not just me). Busy Bee Kindergarten is better when we all learn from each other!