Curriculum Mapping

Curriculum mapping

The Scottsdale Unified School District, is very organized in that sense. There is a curriculum site for all the school district. The Curriculum alignment guides for elementary school, middle school, and high school are there.

The site has them organized by subjects, Math, E.L.A, Science, Social Studies. Then you can select your grade level K-5, fourth grade, all you can possibly need is there. For E.L.A they have the units of study by topics, animals and characters, etc. They have several books for selecting the read alouds, the independent reading books, and which chapters of the chapter book you should use for each unit, they have also a map of how they are aligned to the Common Core Standards, and which standards you should be teaching. They have resources for student generated questions, games, research, literature, grading rubric, etc. They even have a video trailer of all the books they students will be reading during the school year. That is very useful for curriculum night. The ELA website also has the alignment with the standards for science and math. They also provide writing prompts.

For Math they are also organized per unit of study, it tells you the pace of each trimester. For trimester one for instance we did place value, addition, subtraction with 3 digits, and multiplication and division with two digits. The chapters of the book, the standards, and even the formative and summative assessment you should use is specified there. They also have the vocabulary you should teach per unit of study. Additionally they show you the standards that will be tested in the first benchmark, and that should give you a good idea for the AZ merit.

I use curriculum mapping every day, as my reference of where I should be. It also helps me plan weekly lessons, and prepare them for testing.