Curriculum Mapping for Second Grade Math
How do you plan for a full year of teaching in your classroom? What curriculum do you choose? How do you choose what to teach during each month of the school year? Here is one way that I have planned and mapped out my curriculum for math.
This post is from a couple of years ago when we had adopted the common core standards and had not adopted a new curriculum. I had to figure out how to organize the curriculum I had and how to supplement it in areas that I did not have.
I have a couple of other blog posts about curriculum mapping, including how to plan out your year using a curriculum map. Here is how I planned second-grade math for the year. You can see the full second-grade math curriculum map in this blog post.
Plan with Your Grade Level Team
Another teacher and I sat down and mapped out the second-grade math CCSS. We literally printed the standards from the CCSS website, cut apart the standards and arranged them on pieces of paper labeled for each month of the school year.
This allowed us to physically move things around and see how certain standards fit in with other events at school or topics that we were covering in the class. While using technology to map out standards is great, sometimes a tactical, physical print out works the best.
Type the Big Ideas and Standards into a Document
I typed them into a curriculum map. These are screenshots from Word, so not the best view, but it gives you an idea of the final product.
For each month, we had a core focus or a math overview, then specific standards within the domains.
We decided to focus on “all” addition for a period of time and then focus on “all” subtraction. We had done the same thing the prior year and it worked well.
We found that students had an excellent foundation in addition and we didn’t have to spend as much time on subtraction
You’ll notice that March was a bit light. I may have moved over some of the February and April standards. Of course, it could have been when spring break was that year or other school-wide events that were scheduled.
Pull Together Your Teaching Resources for the Subject
After making this map, I pulled together several resources that I had in my classroom for second-grade math. At the time time, I didn’t have much, but after this many years and TpT, I have a ton of math resources for second-grade math.
I’m continually forgetting what I have, where it’s located and if I’ve already used it this year! This blog post outlines how I organize my physical and digital resources across all subject areas.
In this instance, I basically printed the table of contents of specific math resources, including our adopted curriculum. I cut and pasted each of the sections of the table of contents onto separate pages, based on the skill being taught.
Each page represented a standard or a topic outlined in the curriculum map above.
I then created a notebook for each major math topic of the school year:
- Basic Facts (addition, subtraction & multiplication)
- Place Value
- Multi-digit Addition & Subtraction
- Geometry
- Measurement
Each binder included the cut-and-paste table of contents and applicable resources for which I had hard copies. This made it easy for me to grab a binder and plan out a unit of instruction for each month.
My plan was to map out a scope and sequence for each of these binders, which will pretty much be my math curriculum for the year! Having it all planned out made teaching and finding the resources so much easier. Plus, it helped me dig deep into the standards.
These are the some of the resources I used at the time:
How do you plan for math? What resources do you use to build your math program? I’d love to hear how you plan for your year!
Other Blog posts that will Help You Plan for Your Year
Would you like some FREE Planning Resources? Scroll above a bit to access my Curriculum Map Template. Below is my Second Grade Curriculum Map. Click the pictures, enter your email address and you’ll receive an email with a link to download the resource.
Thank you for walking through what you did. Next year we will be in the same boat – new standards and old curriculum. At this point I’m thinking it will be a summer project…
We’re doing a very similar thing at our school right now – not for Common Core though (since we don’t use it) but for an international accreditation process. We’re aligning our Math from the bottom of the school to the top, vertically and horizontally. It’s a huge job but I’m already seeing the value of it. I love your binder idea for each area. We divided our curriculum up into Numbers, Calculating, Shape and Space, Data and Measurement and a couple of others that have completely vanished from my mind at the moment since I’m on holiday 🙂 Binders would work brilliantly for keeping all our resources together under the correct area headings (right now they’re kind of all over the place) We also use a yearly planner like you have above – very detailed and very specific (down to page numbers and websites 🙂 )
Lynn
Fun in the Fours
Wow what a big job….but soooo worthwhile in the end! Even though I don’t follow same curriculum as you I would be very interested in seeing the completed work just to see a logical scope and sequence to follow.
If you click on the link for the second grade math curriculum map, you can see an example of that one. I don’t have a language arts example that is clean and consistent enough to share. I’ve always switched things around as the year has progressed.