Harnessing the Power of a Scope & Sequence 

Part of Lesson Plan Academy

As we talked about in our last lesson, the scope and sequence is your roadmap for the whole school year. Simply put, a scope and sequence is what standards you will be teaching and when you will be teaching them. It is the foundation of all your lesson planning and will keep you organized throughout the year.  

If you do not have a scope and sequence, making one should be your first step before you do any lesson planning. The scope and sequence should be something that your whole grade level team follows, so use some PLC time to get one made. 

Breaking Down the Standards 

Start by spending time “unpacking” the standards that you have to teach for each subject. Break apart each standard into smaller objectives. Ask questions like: 

• What does proficiency in this standard look like?  
• Are there any skills that need to be taught before we can cover this standard? 

As you do this, you’ll start to see a logical order to teach the standards in to build upon each other. It will also help you to gauge how long something will take to teach. A standard that can be broken down into 5 objectives won’t take as long as a standard that breaks down into 10. 

Take notes on all of this, as it will be helpful when writing the scope and sequence, as well as the units. 

Once this is done, you can lay out when you will cover each standard and its objectives. 

Writing the Scope & Sequence 

Create a table with a column for each subject you teach and rows for each week of the school year. Add important events that you need to keep in mind, such as testing, holidays, scheduled field trips, etc. 

Fill in each week with what standards and objectives will be covered for each subject. For example, for writing, you might schedule a week covering capitals and punctuation, a week covering sentence types, 10 weeks to work on narrative writing, and so on.  

What you schedule for each week should just be a brief description of what will be covered, not a full lesson plan. However, if you have certain lessons that you want the whole grade level to teach for a week, such as a specific writing prompt everyone will work on, or a STEM experiment, write these into the scope as well. 

Utilizing the Scope & Sequence to Plan Efficiently 

With the standards broken down into smaller objectives, and a completed scope of the whole year, you are now primed to plan units and lessons. Your scope and sequence will serve as a reference for you for the whole year, so make sure you keep it with your plan book. As you plan, follow the scope and sequence. You’ll never wonder what you are teaching next, and you’ll teach more effectively.