Make Your Own Curriculum Guide for Special Education

I am so excited to introduce this week’s guest blogger, Faith from Ms. D’s Sped Space to provide you some steps to making a curriculum guide if one isn’t provided to you. 

What is a curriculum guide?

I know this may look different depending on what or where you teach. I want to be clear on what mine looks like. For me, a curriculum guide includes the subject, the month of the school year, the standards I want to teach that month, and any quick ideas to teach those standards. 

The benefit to having a curriculum guide ready to go at the start of the school year is that it saves so much time figuring out what to teach each month. You’re able to pull up the document really quickly and begin creating lessons based on what you came up with. If you’re wanting to do this for next year to be a step ahead, keep reading to read some easy steps to making it!

School Subjects for your Curriculum Map

You want to create documents for each subject you teach. In each document you want to have a table with four columns- one with the month, one with the major topic, one with the standards, and one with any lesson ideas.

Then there would be a tow for each month of the school year. I list August to June but this may look different for everyone. Once you have the table set up in each document, you want to start with one subject and focus on one at a time. 

State Standards

I pull up my state’s Extended Content Standards because I am a self contained teacher. However, make sure you follow the standards your classroom is following based on your state. When looking at the standards, I begin to look at the larger topics the standards are wanting to teach. For example, if I have standards about adding and subtracting fractions, “fractions” is the larger topic.

After I get a good look at the standards, I start to fill in these larger topics into the months. I consider the months that lend itself for better learning given the time of year. For example, shapes and transformations should be taught together or living things should be taught in warmer months because you can get students outside for real life learning. After the larger topics are filled into the columns, you want to fill in the specific standards as well.

Lesson Ideas and Activities

After you know the topic and standards you want to teach each month, spend time putting down lesson ideas in the last column. Remember you aren’t actually lesson planning, but write down any activities you know work for certain topics. Consider any resources you know that are available for that topic. This will save you time lesson planning because you have a few ideas when it comes time to lesson plan. 

Do you have any questions about making your own curriculum guide? Let me know on Instagram or Tik tok (@msdsspedspace on both platforms!)

Looking for more curriculum guide tips, read more here and here!

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