Let’s talk about curriculum systems

Now, I know that many of you may not have a basic setup when it comes to curriculum because you may have a federal-funded program, a state-funded program, or your own private program operating within your building at the time. And I get it, it’s a lot, right?

But I want to encourage you to think about utilizing what we teach here at the School of Systems. We teach to utilize a semester system. It’s so easy and more engaging. As for me, I feel more in control of what I’m doing in my business when I utilize this system.

So let me tell you about it within the semester system we set it on a 12-week flow. This 12-week flow allows me 10 weeks of my students learning my goals and objectives. I set them in place based on our state learning standards. Now that means you also need to learn a little bit about your current purchase curriculum. Whether it’s a federal or state or private curriculum, you got to learn about it. 

So I took time to learn about them and break them down into semesters, so every 10 weeks, there are learning standards that my teachers create lesson plans around so that I have done everything I can in my power to ensure that the children meet certain milestones. And so this goes from infants all the way through our after-school program (so that’s for 12 years old here), and we create milestones based on our learning standards in our area which is our state-funded program.

And so when we do that, we teach for the first 10 ten weeks and then the last two weeks is where the difference is. The difference that we do in the last two weeks, is we allot the 11th week to assess the children whether they accomplished the writing test, reading test, etc. We use tools in order to track those. Some tools may be provided to you online and we also have a pen and paper system (which I will show you later) to assess the children to make sure that they are on top of what they should be on top in their classroom. For the 12th week, we spend a few days, training our teachers who are going over the next 10 weeks.

We have visuals, charts, curriculum, and supplements to the curriculum. Plus we have fun, there’s food for the team as we train our teachers every 11th going to the 12th week. So that when there’s a new hire, we’re assured that when the time comes they are prepped and ready for what will happen on the 12th week and beyond.

In our 12th week, this is also where we send home the assessment or report cards.

We send them home and invite parents to come in and become a part of our close-out to move them into the next 10 weeks by having a parent conference. All we have to do is pull our handy tool and what’s our handy tool? It’s our assessment folder.