How to Create an ELA Year Plan
This post explains how to plan your English Language Arts program based on the Saskatchewan curriculum. If you teach in a different province, the ideas presented can easily be adjusted to your specific curriculum.
An ELA Year Planning Guide can be downloaded at the end of this post.
It can feel overwhelming to determine how to map out all the components of Language Arts into your year plan. The best way to do so is by creating a theme-based year plan. Let’s find out some reasons why a theme-based ELA year plan is recommended.
5 Key Reasons for
Theme-based Teaching
Reason #1: Teaching by Themes is Brain-Friendly
Our brain is a pattern-seeking organ. Teaching different subjects’ concepts and skills within the framework of a theme allows the brain to make connections throughout each school day as well as during the weeks that instruction relates to the chosen theme. Students have more success mastering new information since this aligns with how our brain learns. For the teacher, less time is needed to reteach skills that students have not grasped.
Reason #2: Student Motivation
In general, students are highly motivated when their learning is immersed in an engaging theme.
We all know that when students are engaged in their learning, behaviour issues are far less frequent.
Reason #3: Time Management
It’s always challenging for teachers to fit in all the subjects and outcomes expected in a given year. Teaching by themes allows you to integrate multiple subjects into your lessons, thereby reducing the number of stand-alone lessons you need to find time to teach.
Reason #4: Meaningful Instruction
Teachers often come across resources they love (from colleagues, Pinterest, TPT, etc.) When you teach by themes, that resource you fell in love with can become a part of one of your themes/units in a much more meaningful way than if you just threw into your day plan out of the blue.
Reason #5: Real-World Learning
Our ultimate goal is to help our students become lifelong learners. In the real world, their learning will center around a theme, topic, and/or problem. They will need to apply multiple skills to a new situation. When we teach through themes, this mimics real-world learning more closely than teaching subjects in isolation.
Download your copy of the step-by-step guide to creating a theme-based ELA year plan.
