Annual Plans

There are so many advantages to creating annual plans before the school year begins. Annual plans are plans that teachers devise for each subject area (or as one large plan combining all areas) to know when they will be teaching each unit of study. Using school calendars is a great starting point for creating an annual plan, as this helps to visualize which days will actually be instructional days and which days will be early release, teacher workdays or holidays. Creating annual plans from these school calendars help to create a plan based on "reality."

Since each year, students in any given teacher's classroom are different and very diverse, it is important that annual plans be created in a way that they can be revised later, based on the actual pace of that particular classroom of students. Since there is no set way to create an annual plan, it is an advantage that they can be flexible. Annual plans have many advantages, and they can be very beneficial through the planning processes for teachers who choose to use them.

Resources are the building blocks for planning a unit. There are several types of resources that can be consulted when planning a unit such as the Standard Course of Study, educational websites that include lesson plans and assessments, museum websites, colleagues, professional development opportunities and other educational resources. Consulting several resources when planning units is so important, because oftentimes, these resources are where we get our great ideas as teachers!