What are the advantages and disadvantages of an annual plan? Why start with resources in designing units?
I was super excited to begin learning about annual plans. I have always been worried about how I would plan a whole year of teaching, making sure to cover all of the objectives in time. Seeing this annual plan come together (with a lot of help from my group members) helped me understand that it is possible to plan out a year from day one and make sure that all of the objectives have been included. Planning for fourth grade social studies, while a little challenging because it is our/my first annual plan, seems like it might be easier than say, planning a whole year for Kindergarten or First grade. Fourth grade social studies is full of interesting topics that work together in a way that make it easy to create a chronological flow to the annual plan.
I can see how annual plans would help teachers envision their year and figure out how quickly they need to move and what topics they need to spend the most time on, but when it comes to interdisciplinary teaching, I wonder how well the two work together. If I were to make annual plans for language arts, math, science and social studies, how would I plan to merge them into each other at specific points, so that I could use interdisciplinary teaching sometimes? Or, would I create something like a master annual plan with each subject say, in a different color. That way, I could plan units and include multiple disciplines for each unit. It just seems like this type of planning would take a lot of time and effort, but it might be worth it.
Another thing I wonder about with annual plans is, if you have everything planned out to the exact week, then, in November or February you are assessing and realize that the majority of your students are still totally lost at the end of a week long or two week long unit (which you should have already caught in formative assessments, but somehow missed, what happens to the rest of your annual plan? You can't take another two weeks to reteach the information because you will get way behind. Should you plan for wiggle room in your annual plan?
Okay so you're still thinking in "subject mode" and you won't need to create a separate annual plan for each subject. Take your SS topics plan y'all have created and WITHIN each of those units you'll also be concurrently teaching other subjects, hence the reason why most of your lessons are meeting multiple objectives. And yes, most certainly, you'll need wiggle room in your plan. Life, particularly teaching, is about being flexible. If you need more time on a topic after assessing the students, then you make adjustments or find a way to continue to incorporate those skills throughout the next unit.
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