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It's always a little disconcerting when your students aren't understanding an objective you feel you've taught. It's even more frustrating when materials to support that Common Core State Standard don't seem to exist in read-to-use format anywhere. This is the case with our objective on writing structure in third grade. After a week of getting nowhere, I wrote some paragraphs, armed my kids with highlighters, and broke out the trusted flip book template for a lesson that finally connected.

"The school year isn't a series of sprints, but the way you forge your curriculum can make it feel that way. The most common way of structuring how you teach is by first assembling standards into units, then those units into lessons. You may use a backwards-design process (popularized by UbD and Grant Wiggins), where you start with what you want the students to understand, then decide what can act as evidence of that understanding, then finally design an assessment that provides the best opportunity to uncover what students know."

Illustrative mathematics 3.OA Fish Tanks representing a situation (versus a story problem, which is what students are so used to solving). A situation is a wonderful way to infuse content standards with math practices, such a MP&, looking for structures, and MP5 working with real-world models

"It is critical that teachers structure units and lessons so that all students can access a clear standard. Students who struggle must understand what they need to do to meet expectations and students who are advanced must be challenged to meet a more complex learning goal."