Year-Long Planning: Keep the Big Picture in Mind from the Beginning

The Context: There are two weeks until school starts here in the Pacific Northwest, which means educators (myself included) are busy with all the essential beginning of the year tasks like room arrangement, filling in nametags/seating charts, sending out welcome letters, and setting up gradebooks and conferring systems. While all these things are important to accomplish before the first day of school, one of the most important things to do now is develop a year-long pacing calendar.

Why It Matters: Plotting all of your subjects and units on a one-page calendar is essential for several reasons. 

• Even if you have a scope and sequence from your district, putting the units on a calendar allows you to see what is being taught in every subject at the same time. This allows you to plan for meaningful integration, which is especially important for writing.  Look across the subjects to see how the type of writing you are doing in writing workshop relates to what students are studying in other subjects. Then you can find mentor texts related to the content to use during writing workshop minilessons, and also create meaningful writing assignments to do during the other subjects to help students deepen their understanding of the content.
• A one-page pacing calendar for all subjects lets you see the timing of units in relation to school breaks and holidays and make adjustments as needed. This year, when I put my units on the calendar, I discovered some ended one week after winter break. Teaching the last week of a unit after a two week break doesn’t make sense for my students.  Knowing that I want to end one week earlier allows me to make adjustments ahead when I’m planning for the unit, instead of getting to the week before winter break and realizing I need to cram everything left into one week.
• There is one thing all teachers agree on: there is never enough time! Having a one-page pacing calendar helps keep you on track so that those final units of the year don’t get skipped because there isn’t enough time. Post a copy where you will see it regularly, especially when unit and lesson planning. This will ensure you get to all of the standards your students need to learn.

Example in Action: Here is an example of a year-long pacing calendar from my Spanish-English dual language school. For some context, we have integrated literacy/content units with integrated literacy/science units in Spanish and integrated literacy/social studies units in English.

Ready to make you own? Here’s a 2025-26 Unit Pacing Calendar template to help you get started.

The Bottom Line: It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture at the beginning of the year with so many things to do, but creating a year-long pacing calendar now will keep you on-track and allow you to provide rich, integrated writing instruction in your writing workshop and across subjects.

Bonus: Done with your year-long plan? Here’s a a 2025-26 monthly calendar template to use for unit planning.