Planning for the New Primary Language Curriculum Made Simple

Every month we give our blog over to one of our wonderful teacher sellers to give you some advice and tips for your classroom. Our September teacher is Top Teaching Resources and she has very kindly written a piece about making the New Primary Curriculum easier to understand. Please visit her store: Top Teaching Resources!

I am currently teaching First Class and have used the new Primary Language Curriculum (PLC) for teaching and planning for the past year. It seemed very daunting at first, but once I got my head around the terminology in the new curriculum, it became no more challenging than planning for the 1999 curriculum.

This is a very simple explanation of the PLC that I used to understand the terminology and to transition from the 1999 curriculum in my planning and teaching:

 

Long Term Planning

The long term planning was relatively straightforward, however it was very time consuming as it involved typing up all of the learning outcomes, as you can see in this sample page from one of my plans. I did detailed sample plans for both Gaeilge and English for all classes using the new Primary Language Curriculum. These plans have already been purchased by hundreds of teachers on Mash who were happy to have had the hard work done for them! On my Mash shop I sell these long term plans as a bundle with Gaeilge and English together, individually, or as part of a planning bundle with all of the other subject plans for a particular class level. All of the plans on my Mash store have a detailed description and screen grabs so you know exactly what you are getting in advance.

 

Short Term Planning

Fortnightly planning using the PLC proved much more challenging, and it took me weeks of research and experimenting before I came up with a template that I was happy with. I did not find the PDST templates clear enough or easy to use so I created a template that included all of their suggested content, but which I found much more straightforward.

Above is a screen grab of part of my short term plan. I have three columns under the “milestones and progression steps” section. This is for the 3 ability groupings in my class. Depending on your class (or if you are teaching in a multi-class setting) you may have less or more groupings than this and you can delete or add columns as appropriate to your circumstances. I found it most helpful to think of milestones as your estimation of where the children are in their learning now (I colour coded these in green), and the progression steps are where you want the children to go next (I colour coded these in blue).

Links to Products

I hope that the above has been helpful in getting to grips with planning for the new PLC. I put a huge amount of research, time and thought into the sample plans that I have done, and I am confident that you will be satisfied if you purchase one. You can browse all of my products on my Mash shop, Top Teaching Resources here: https://mash.ie/store/top-teaching-resources/

Or if you are looking for specific plans relating to the new Primary Language Curriculum check out the below links: