Math Planning Calendar

I love teaching math. I use the math textbook as a guide but I rely heavily on other math resources. It’s like a melting pot of ideas and strategies. Below is the math planning calendar I created for myself a few years ago. I use this every year as a guideline.

But I must confess I didn’t use this format last year because I was trying to wrap my fingers around the Common Core Math Standards…so I mainly stuck with a thirty minute whole group math lesson and math stations.

But this year I’m going back to my original idea. It just helps me stay more focused and I’m able to get in all the activities my students love.


Note: This calendar is for 2009, but I don't pay attention to the dates just the activities for the week as I make my plans for this year.


If you look at my calendar I reference the book I’m using for a particular lesson or activity,  the codes are as follows:
psl= 50 Problem Solving Lessons
Collection= A Collection of Math Lessons
ML= Math and Literature
You can click on the picture to download a copy of the calendar.

Here’s how it went:
After the daily story problem we’d have a whole group math lesson (This year my school will be using Investigations). During the beginning of the year I used this time to introduce easy math games, and do some Quick Images (subtizing activities). You can read about that here. Each day the whole group lessons had a different focus but still related to the concept for the week.
Here’s how that went:
Monday: Weekly Graph Day (We refer to this graph all week using our Weekly Graph Journals.
     


Tuesday: Math Games (As my whole group time focused more on the lesson for the day I had less time to introduce math games. So I blocked out time on Tuesdays to introduce new math games and give my students time to play them.

Wednesday: Glyph Day. I have all the scholastic glyph books so each week we’d create a glyph.


Thursday: Thinking Thursday. Every Thursday we’d do some sort of problem solving activity or Math and Literature activity. I used these books as my go to’s and created a few of my own. I’m working on some Math and Literature activities to share with you soon.




Friday: Friday Fun Graph Day or Edible Estimation: Every Friday we’d do one or the other. My students loved this!
    
I still had time for math stations  M-Fri but I used the activities described above  in the place of a whole group lesson. Once I introduced the concept on Monday I’d follow up with small group instruction while the rest of the class visited math stations, that helped me to reach the strugglers instead of going over the same thing with the whole class when not everybody needed it.



I’m revamping my edible estimation activities and my Number Talk papers and hope to have them uploaded to my TpT store by the beginning of July…and I’m working on a way to have my Promethean board activities available in my store. Keep your fingers crossed.
I hope you found something useful.
How do you plan for math instruction????