Special Education Weekly Lesson Planning (& a Lucky Freebie!)

Frame from Winterpix Wonders

I've been asked about lesson planning and how I do it. 

But first, I have a few questions for you!

Questions

How does your school or grade-level team lesson plan?

Do you plan together as a team, vertical plan based on content, or individually plan for your own class?

Do you submit lesson plans to a "coach" or adminstrator?

Is there a required format that you follow?

Answers

Our grade-level teams plan in the following way: each teacher tackles one content area: Math, Comprehension, Writing, Language, Vocabulary/Morning Message, and Phonics. This teacher writes the unit plans and assessments, weekly lessons, resources for class (flipcharts, activity pages, exit tickets), and homework. These lesson plans are shared out 2 weeks (10 days minimum) in advance on our "intranet" where we can upload files. Each teacher is also required to presubmit their lesson plan to a designated Teacher Development Leader (often an administrator) for review. This review is a big process at the beginning of the year with constructive feedback, and then often falls into a "check for completion" after the first quarter of the school year. 

We backwards plan the year, so the scope and sequence and unit plans/calendar are already shared out before the school year starts (we work during the summer!). This "big picture" is extremely helpful to the special educator (me!) and I access them often. Weekly grade-level team meetings often include discussions regarding timing adjustments to the completed plans due to field trips, snow days, and/or data review
(i.e.: our students need more practice!).

The lesson planners also meet vertically with other grade levels planning the same content area. For example, the first grade teacher planning math will meet with the kindergarten and 2nd-4th grade math teachers to discuss key teaching points. 

As the special educator, I download the general education weekly lesson plans and then differentiate them for students on my caseload. I'd love to say I do it the same way every week/month/year, but as my students' needs change, 

so does my planning!

This year, I've often "stuck to the script" for comprehension, phonics, and math, and then differentiated the presentation 

(small groups, more guided practice, parallel teaching). 

Next, I supplement and add in tons and TONS of spiral review based on data analysis (I collect data daily!). In previous years, my students have been in a completely different place than the general education population, so my lessons were following a  different (more "bare bones") scope and sequence. It completely depends on my students' IEP goals and objectives and their areas of strength/growth. VERY interesting, especially because my first graders seem to grow and change WEEKLY! 

This makes my job exhausting exciting! :)

I submit my lesson plans 10 days in advance to my team leader. This is the accountability piece our school has built in for every teacher. I find that my lesson plans can be cumbersome and I don't refer to them too often throughout the week. Still, they are a great resource when I'm prepping and/or a student is absent and we need to find a way to catch up the instruction. 

Here's what my weekly lesson plan overview looks like:

This is the top page on my clipboard that goes everywhere with me. By the end of the week, it's covered with colorful notes using my all-time favorite pens:

It's a great "catch-all" page and has solved my "sticky note" situation, or worse, writing on my hand!

We only teach comprehension 4 days a week, so the "blank box" is usually filled with notes about who needs make-up testing, a reteach/preteach, etc.

 LLI refers to Leveled Literacy Instruction (Fountas and Pinnell). I pull small groups for LLI during the writing block. 

Underneath this overview page, there's an one-page lesson plan for every single box! This is especially helpful when you see the same objective listed on the overview page for phonics. This is a rare exception, but it's accurate for the beginning of our syllables unit. Each day's lesson plan goes more indepth with the objective, guided practice, and assessment.

These are often cut and paste directly from the general educator's lesson plan. I may differentiate the independent practice by providing a word bank or sentence starters, or I may plan to use additional visuals. I prep these items the weekend before and don't include them on the written lesson plan. My final lesson plans for the week are usually 20 pages and I am required to print them out and have them on-hand. I will admit, I hardly ever 'flip the page" throughout the week and instead use the overview page for my main resource. 

There's also So. Much. MORE I'm doing throughout the school day...testing, intervention (my students are working on kindergarten sight words, as well as first grade), data collecting, etc. I will share out my daily and weekly schedule soon!

Every Monday morning, I take the previous week's LPs and insert them into an ever-growing binder (required), and then add the current week to the clipboard. We keep the binders through the end of the school year and then recycle the 500+ pages on the last day of school. It would be great to reuse the lessons each year, but so far my experience is that every year we've been making big changes to the unit content and scope & sequence. I may use the same support materials (or not), but not the same plans. Besides, what would I do with my weekends if we did that? ;)

Although I truly ♥ what I do, you may notice there's not a lot of room for "extras" such as craftivities or holiday fun. I struggle with this a bit, especially when I see all the visual plans shared out in the blogging community. For me to include anything "fun," it has to also be content-based. I've been making a push to include an interactive component, but it is a challenge. We don't have a lot of extra time for cutting, gluing, and just being a first grader! I see this as a problem and I'm always looking for a solution to it! 

Does this planning look similar to what you do or your special educator does?

I'd love to hear how you plan!

UPDATE:

I just made this quick & easy freebie for my students! We are working with place value, 10 more/10 less...and these cards will be perfect for a "lucky" warm-up! Please click here to download!

This freebie is also linked up with the fabulous 

Classroom Freebies!