Dear indecisive teachers,

In June, I excitedly announced to my #teachersquad that I had my first semester planned out, and that I loved every lesson in it!

They laughed. Not because I was geeking out about curriculum -- they’re used to that. No, they were laughing because they know me well enough to know that any master calendar is going to go through complete rewrites daily. And they were right. And it did.

The placement on a calendar has always been a challenge. I need to add a re-teaching lesson or plan for a sub or adapt for pep rallies and other interruptions and the calendar becomes a mess of copying and pasting.

As I was reading 180 Days by Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher this morning, I was rethinking how I could increase the diversity of the writing my kids do on a daily basis. After picking through the units I had designed, I came to a three part lesson design that I wanted to replicate throughout the year. This, then, grew into my new lesson planning tool: A Lesson Map.

This lesson map is an extension of the concept map I posted about recently, with content broken into units. The solution here lies in the format. Using this model, I can easily add lesson or entire units wherever needed. At the same time, I can still simply copy and paste them into my weekly lesson plans.

So, today, I just want to share it. Here is an excerpt from my own lesson map, and here is a link to the free resource! Hope it helps!​