2014-2015 Pacing Guide

Well hello again blogging world!  My goodness it has been a while since my last post.....AGAIN!  I just don't know how all you bloggers do it but I am trying hard to make it more of a habit.  I love sharing my ideas since I am constantly getting inspiration from so many other teachers but man it's hard to find the time to do it.  We'll give it another go this school year and see how I do.

I just finished updating my grade levels pacing guide for the upcoming school year so I thought I would go ahead and share it with you all and tell you how we use it.  Here is what it looks like:

 This is a screen shot of the entire spreadsheet.

Here is a close up of one of the first page so you can get a better look at it.

My grade level team and I use this as a guide to pace out our year.  It is color coded by term and includes a column for the week #, Dates, Holidays, assessments, our science/social studies units, Phonic/Language Focus, Reading/Listening and Speaking Standards, Writing, and Math.  Our units are based off of the Next Generation Science Standards and our states social studies standards.  The Phonics/Language Focus Column is based off of  Houghton Mifflin Spelling.  We use the spelling that came with HM in my grade level, but have some differentiated lists we use that follow the same spelling patterns as HM.  When it is a review week or writer's workshop week and we have no phonics focus we cover other Language standards that we haven't hit and that don't get hit with our spelling lists.  The reading/listening and speaking columns are really just a guide.  We don't hit all those standards during the same week or at exactly the week it is listed on the pacing guide, but try to make sure we hit all the ones listed for each term by the end of the grading period so that we have consistent grades.  Usually we're focusing on the same standard at the same time but sometimes have to stagger ourselves so that we can share resources.  The math columns just got changed.  Next year my school voted to follow the Engage NY math curriculum so I went though the pacing guide that came with that and added it to the math column.  It is supposed to take exactly 180 days if you use every lesson, which is every day of the entire school year!  So ,obviously we will have to do some modifying along the way.  I'll post more about that as we work our way through the program this year.  I got the idea to create this pacing guide from a former 1st grade teacher that I worked with.  I love how it puts the pacing for every subject in one place, so much easier than looking at a bunch of different pacing guides.  I simply print it out, glue it together and hang it on the bulletin board above my desk for easy viewing.  I also have it saved on dropbox for easy viewing when I'm away from my desk (like when I'm doing my planning at home).  If you would like to modify this for your own classroom click here.