As teachers, we love taking a look into other teachers’ classrooms and peeking in at their bulletin boards, seating arrangements, libraries, all of it! And one thing we really love to take a look at are other teachers’ long range plans for their middle school students. It’s always so interesting to see how other teachers go about their curriculum mapping.

So, Jessica and I thought, why not share our long range ELA plans with you! Jessica put her 5th grade curriculum map together, and I did mine for my 8th grade ELA curriculum as well.

Long Range ELA Plans for Middle School

These are Jessica’s plans for her 5th Grade ELA class. As you can see, she chose to break it down into the areas she was planning to focus on for each month.

On the other hand, I set mine up a bit differently. I like to break my year down basically to the day.

Some suggestions for sitting down to long range plan …

When mapping out our plans for the year, we take a look at the general standards (anyone else use the Common Core app on their phones?) we need to cover in our respective grades and decide which units best help our students meet those standards. Then we match the units to certain months (example: “The Gift of the Magi” in December/January since it’s a holiday story).

Even though each month may focus on a different topic (informational text, poetry, etc.) or a different novel, we both use evidence-based writing/literary analysis throughout the year and tie it into as many of our units as possible (think Response to Literature essays, Socratic Seminars, critical thinking task cards …). We’ve found that this helps our students best master this style of writing as opposed to as a stand alone unit.

We highly encourage you to create your own long term plans if you haven’t already. It makes an incredible difference for the organization and flow of your entire year!

If you’d like to grab both of our long range plans as well as templates that you can use to write your own, just complete the form below and we’ll send them right to your inbox!