Pacing Guide
For someone who has openly admitted to not following curriculum pacing guides, I sure spent a ridiculous amount of time churning one out. Our middle school is adopting CPM Core Connections 1, 2, and 3. Aside from our own reviews, the decision to go with CPM were also based on:
Desmos is embedded in many lessons
Other teachers' reviews, including Riley Lark's
I don't know if this would be of any use to you, but I might as well share the doc math 8 pacing 2014-2015. It's kinda pretty.
I replicate our school calendar and put in all the holidays and half-days. I go to each chapter in CPM and write down the guiding questions. Matching up the standards to each chapter was a pain in the ass. (CPM does it the other way around: they have the standards in one column and the different lessons that cover those standards in another.) The suggested number of days for each chapter does not include assessments, so I add about 6 days on top of whatever CPM recommended. I'm going to post the pacing guide near my desk — probably the only document I will print in full color this school year.
(Oh, I took out Chapter 1 because it's on problem solving. C'mon, I got this.)
Then I'm going supplement it like crazy. I can't teach straight from the textbook. Just can't. So the 6 days that I add to each chapter will hopefully allow us some wiggle room to do other stuff.
Other stuff includes, but not limited to, what you see on the right sidebar of my blog.
We also need time to begin each class period with math talks because it was one of the most powerful things we did last year. (Grrrrr. Just realized that most of the images on the math talks site are not there. Why now.)
I was brainstorming with a couple of 6th grade math teachers at another district, and we were listing out a possible warm-up/math talk schedule, something like:
Monday: number talk (spreadsheet that you can take from and add to)
Tuesday: visual pattern
Wednesday: estimation 180
Thursday: fun fact, or WYR, or Keeping Skills Sharp, or SBAC/review question
Friday: personal reflection
My assignment this year looks almost like last year's: 2 sections of Math 6, 1 section of Math 8, and 1 section of Geometry [1].
I wish you a healthy school year. Teach what you love and love the kids. Follow the rules, but break a few if doing so makes it better for the kids.
[1] I'm happy to say that we will no longer be tracking kids in math. However, we need to finish out what we'd started with these 8th graders who took Algebra last year as 7th graders. So this group will do some geometry, some stats, and a whole lot of problem solving.