How to Write a Play Based Learning Term Overview

If you think curriculum planning and mapping out your term is hard work and you find it a dreaded task that seems to take you forever, you are going to love this blog post on how to write a play-based learning term overview.

Writing a term overview can be quick and easy.

In this blog post you will discover how to turn this teacher planning task into an enjoyable process that doesn’t take you all afternoon!

For play based learning to be effective, you need to understand your curriculum and have detailed planning in place. Thoughtful and informed planning will ensure you deliver successful learning invitations and lessons which are aligned to your curriculum and your children.

Planning is critical to your success in a play based classroom. Your planning needs to be intentional. Some educators think play based learning is a free for all where the children amuse themselves playing all day but if you want your children to reach the curriculum benchmarks, your play-based learning program cannot be an unorganised free-for-all.

The learning invitations and explicit teaching lessons you provide must be planned according to your student’s developmental needs and their interests. If you want to also meet curriculum benchmarks, you must plan and purposefully link it all to your mandated curriculum.

Good planning will reassure you that all the curriculum goals are covered and it all starts with the Term Overview.

What is a Term Overview?

The term overview is a document outlining the learning intentions for the entire term. For us, a term is usually a ten-week block so your term overview is going to contain all the learning intentions you intend to teach for those ten weeks.

What is a Term Menu?

If you are implementing The Walker Learning Approach, you will be familiar with a term menu. A term overview and a term menu are the same thing.

A term menu is an overview of what is expected to be covered in explicit lessons and during investigations for the school term.

At our school, we plan as a cohort. This ensures consistency throughout the year level (and keeps admin happy!) I love planning with my teaching cohort. We all get together and share the workload, brainstorm ideas, and make sure we are clear on where we are headed for the term.

At the end of our planning session, we all walk away with the exact same term menu.

First Considerations when Planning the Term Overview

The first thing you need to think about when writing your term overview should be your students. Afterall, this planning document is ultimately for them.

Consider your children’s strengths, interests, and developmental needs. And don’t just focus on the academic outcomes they need to achieve. Think about their social and emotional development too.

Keep these things in your mind as you map out your term.

Start with the Curriculum

When you start writing your term overview, you should ensure all of the necessary mandated curriculum learning intentions are included.

I am certainly thinking about my current cohort of children and their individual strengths, interests, and needs when I start planning. I’m also thinking about possible supports and prior learning opportunities that I may need to implement. But I am not personalising the planning yet. In this initial phase of the planning process, it is just about writing a curriculum aligned learning overview.

I have a quick and easy method for transferring the C2C documents into a concise and useful term menu.

Sometimes you will see an inspiring activity or investigation area on Pinterest or Instagram and want to implement it straight away in your classroom. This happens to me ALL the time!!

In these situations, the children’s needs and the curriculum guides unfortunately become an afterthought.

If you want to have successful and purposeful lessons and activities however, your term overview needs to be written first. Inspiring learning invitations from Instagram or Pinterest should not be your starting point. Start with your curriculum guides.

Your curriculum documents might be ACARA or here in Queensland, we are strongly influenced by the C2C documents. As I’m a Queensland teacher, this means we start with the C2C documents. You can easily modify my guide to writing a term overview to whichever curriculum documents your particular state or territory mandates.

Step 1 in Writing a Term Menu

We start with a blank Term Menu Template and the C2C Unit Plans. You will have a blank Term Menu Template if you are implementing the Walker Learning Approach.

If you are not implementing this learning pedagogy, you can download a generic play-based learning term menu template HERE.

First you simply copy and paste ALL the Content Descriptors from the C2C Units you are studying this term onto the second page of your Term Menu.

Make sure you have copied all the content descriptors from every subject you intend teaching this term. It should look something like this.

Step 2 in Writing a Term Menu

Now that you have checked all the content descriptors are in place, you can start to fill out the first page of the Term Menu.

Because we plan fortnightly instead of weekly, we check that the teaching sequence outined in the C2C units can be broken into 2-week blocks. We also timetable in any assessments for the term.

Then it is a simple matter of copying and pasting each c2c unit lesson Objective OR Evidence of Learning into each subject column on the Term Menu. Don’t forget to add in your planned assessments.

Step 3 in Writing a Term Menu

Here’s a great tip - If you colour code each fortnight, it will make it easier to write your Statement of Intent. The Statement of Intent is our fortnightly planning document. We write it after our term menu. It includes details of our learning intentions and investigation areas.

Each 2 weeks of learning intentions are assigned a colour. The same colours for each fortnightly block are used for every subject. Our colour coding looks like this 👇

And that’s it. You have a term overview or term menu completed.

You can be confident that this term overview completely aligns to your mandated curriculum.

This easy process of writing a term overview ensures you will be meeting all your legal requirements and state or territory curriculum objectives. It also gives you the opportunity to include any mandated assessments.

Creating a term overview in this way is great for allowing you to see possible cross-curriculum links and ways you can integrate learning across lessons and investigations.

If you liked this process for writing a term overview, you can download it as a PowerPoint presentation HERE in my Free Resource Library. It includes all the pictures and information in this blog post as well as how to write a Statement of Intent.

After I have written this detailed term menu, I like to convert it into a one page short overview to help me organise resources and quickly remind me what is coming up in the term. This one page document includes assessments and school events I need to remember to plan for too. If you would like to learn more about the one page short Term Menu, check out this blog post - Short 10 Week Term Planner.