Teacher Tuesday: from national standards to specific lessons

I'm back today with another post on lesson planning! A couple of weeks ago I shared a brief overview for how I go about my long-range planning. Today I want to talk about my overall process for getting from the broad National Core Arts general music standards to my specific, day-to-day lesson plans.

1. From National Standards to Scope and Sequence

The first step is taking the standards and creating a more specific scope and sequence of skills and concepts that you want to cover in each grade level. In many cases, your district will have something already in place like this for you to use. My district started the process of re-writing our curriculum to align with the new standards this summer, and we came up with a scope and sequence for each grade level that took the concepts from our old curriculum and meshed them with the new standards. The simplest way to explain my way of thinking through the new standards is to think of the new standards as an added layer on top of the skills and concepts mentioned in the old national standards- for example, if you required 2nd graders to read and perform half notes in the old curriculum, you might require 2nd graders to perform half notes by reading standard music notation, and also use half notes in a short rhythmic ostinato accompaniment and discuss how using long and short sounds adds interest to rhythmic accompaniments. If you are interested in more specifics of how I went through this process in my own planning, check out my long-range planning templates. I also use these standards checklists to make sure I have covered all of the standards- it can get confusing and overwhelming when you start going back and forth between multiple documents, and I was finding that often I was completely missing a standard or two after I had finished mapping everything out! Having some way of checking them off as you go can really help with that process.

2. From Scope and Sequence to Monthly Plans

Once I know which skills and concepts I need to cover in each grade level, I like to map out a rough monthly overview of which skills and concepts I will cover in each month of the school year. I think this process is one of the most important ones for effective lesson planning, because I can plan ahead for special events like Music In Our Schools Month and performances, make sure I am keeping myself accountable to getting through everything, and plan out the most logical sequence for introducing new concepts. I wrote more about this specific process in my previous blog post on long-range planning.

3. From Monthly Plans to Daily Lessons

I plan out my specific lessons a week at a time- I plan ahead to have a chunk of time (usually an hour or two) to write out all of my lessons for the week in my planner and make any visuals and other materials I need to go with each lesson. With my monthly concepts planned out, it usually doesn't take me too long to write out my specific lesson plans, especially since I tend to write in a lot of the specific strategies I want to use to teach each concept in my monthly plans, as you can see in the picture above. I am lucky enough not to have to turn in any lesson plans to my administration or anything, so my lesson plans are pretty general- I'm the only one who needs to understand what I'm saying! :) Here's what my weekly lesson plans usually look like:

As you can see, it's really just a list of activities for each class. But I have friends who do have to turn in specific plans, showing how it aligns to the standards and blah blah blah, so I made up a lesson plan template PDF document with clickable check boxes for the standards. You can download that template for free here. And if you want my lesson plans, including all of the visuals I make to go with them, you can get those here.

4. From Daily Lesson Plans into the Classroom

I know some people have their lesson plan book open at their desk, or on their music stand, and just refer to that as needed when they are actually teaching. I am not one of those people. First of all, I don't really have a teacher desk anymore (and I like it that way- more room for movement). And even when I did, I didn't want to be walking over to my desk in the middle of my lesson. Nor do I want to be shuffling through seating charts, grade books, schedules, and lesson plans on my music stand in the middle of my classes- I want everything on my stand to be right at my fingertips (you can see how I have my music stand set up in this previous post). So I take one final step when I get to school each morning: I write out the bare-minimum lesson outlines for each class on a sticky note and stick it on my music stand next to my class schedule. That way I have a place to quickly glance if I lose track of what I'm supposed to do next (which happens more than I care to admit)!

Ready to get your lesson planning system in tip-top shape? My free email series will take you through all of the steps I've discussed here in much greater detail and you'll get exclusive free resources to help you get started! Click below to learn more and sign up:

I hope this helps give you some ideas for taking the standards from broad topics to specific lesson plans! I'd love to discuss this process with other teachers- leave your thoughts, suggestions, and questions in the comments! If you have a blog post to share, you can add it to our linky party on lesson planning resources below. You'll want to check out all of the awesome blog posts linked up- there are some great ideas from tons of music teacher bloggers!

An InLinkz Link-up