Our school uses Beyond Textbooks instead of having curriculum planning meetings and pacing guides and that sort of thing. I think it is VERY helpful! I love that I can print off a copy of the curriculum for the whole year and just review it month-to month and figure out what I really need to work on with the kids. I think the only issue I have with it (and the other teachers have this problem as well) is that it seems too fast-paced! Students are supposed to master a concept barely introduced to them in one week and it's BAM! Off to the next topic. I think that makes it so that students get really immersed in it for a little bit, and seem to understand it, but then when we go off to the new thing, students forget what we talked about the week before!
I noticed that students had a week to add fractions with different denominators, then a week to subtract them, and the next week it was multiplying them in word problems. Well, the students took to multiplying easily enough (if they could just remember to simplify!), but then a few weeks later we had a benchmark test on fractions and even after reviewing fractions a day ahead of time, students STILL had "forgotten" how to find a common denominator! I kind of feel like if I had kept having students add fractions while we were multiplying and dividing fractions, they would have just gotten more confused, and not be able to do either! Even my straight-A, super-smart kids couldn't "remember" what to do when adding and subtracting fractions. They could all whip out the multiplication easily enough, but remembering steps to something else seemed to be beyond them! Don't even get me started on adding mixed numbers versus multiplying/dividing them! The steps all seemed to become blurs that became indistinguishable to the kids!
But back to the curriculum mapping, despite the fast-paced nature of BT, I really like it, and think the students are going to be as prepared as possible for the AIMS test...I just hope it's not at the expense of them memorizing "how to" do work without actually learning and retaining the information!
I think if I were designing a curriculum map for my room, I would use the BT suggestions and calendar, but I would always have a bit of review to keep the skills they've used in the previous week sharp. In fact, that's an excellent thing to use as "bell work" (which I give the student every morning right after they come in from "outs")!
