Step 2 Content

There are two main questions to answer when designing a curriculum: what are you going to teach and how are you going to present it? I’ll refer to the “what” as content.

We live in North Carolina. Their required content is described by grade and subject here. They are using the Common Core Standards for English and mathematics.  These tell you what should be taught in each grade level. Colleges will expect this as a minimum of what students should know.

I also found it helpful to look ahead a few years to see where we were going. For example, in math, I knew it was important for a student to be able to work easily with negatives by the time they take Algebra. Even though it wasn’t a big requirement in 7th grade math, I included lots of negatives in the work.

So, for each subject I started by editing down the course requirements to charts in Word. Each little numbered paragraph is called an objective. Sometimes there are support documents where these objectives are “unpacked”. That means they are explain in great detail along with examples. Those where included in my charts whenever I could find them. If you scroll down this page (http://www.ncpublicschools.org/acre/standards/support-tools/ ) you’ll find PDFs of the unpacked standards for North Carolina for many different subjects. I cut and pasted from the PDF’s into the charts I was making for each subject.

I tried to format the objectives for each subject into units and then units into one or two pages. These went into a curriculum binder I keep next to my laptop. I used clear page protectors to make the paper last longer. It’s my starting point for planning each unit.

Of course, a lot of the objectives just look like gobblygook on their own, but as you dig into them, they’ll start making sense.

Here is a sample from the unpacked science objective: