Reflection on Long Range Plans

Reflect on your experience with writing the long range plan.

I am learning a lot from writing my long range plan. It is very important for teachers to create a plan in the beginning of the year and make sure that they can cover every unit and every standard that they need to. It is important to plan out each unit and make sure that the time line is relatively accurate, so you can get every topic done that you need to. My cooperating teacher gave me a copy of her long range plan back in January and it has been very helpful. She has her plan on an academic calendar, and outlines the theme of the week (for example, spring, animals, presidents, etc). Her plan is basic and is colored coded for math, science, health, phonics/language arts and social studies. Looking at her long range plan has helped me understand how plans could be used even in a kindergarten class. She usually has one or two things in each calendar day, and phonics/language arts is listed most often. She has a science topic that lasts a whole week, and then the next week they do social studies. I know that she uses her long range plan fairly flexibly, since it is hard to predict in August how much time children will need for different topics.

I think that having examples of long range plans from class has been very helpful. I looked at the examples to help me understand each section of the plan. I also thought that looking at each other’s plans in class was very useful. Sometimes you don’t realize the other ways you could have done things until you see them on paper. The examples we looked at in class are from higher grades, and it was hard for me to see how to implement a long range plan in kindergarten, until I saw my cooperating teacher’s plan and some of my fellow classmate’s plans. In my long range plan, I focused on 4 standards for my 9 week plan. I chose not to teach the standards in the order that they are listed in the SC Standards workbook. I think it is important to choose what order units are done, based on your class’ interests and engagement. I thought about doing the units in the order they are listed in, but I realized that it made sense to do the units in another order. I think that creating our own long range plans, reviewing each other’s plans and being able to look at my cooperating teacher’s plan has been very beneficial and a good learning experience for the future.