These documents show the alignment of the BT calendars and the National Geographic (NG) curriculum.
Click here to access the Google Drive folder.
Because Nat Geo is unit based, we wanted to create an alignment document to show you where in the Nat Geo Units those Arizona essential standards can be located. The intention is not to have you teach every single page that is listed on the alignment document! That would be crazy. The intention of the alignment document is to help you identify where the Arizona essential standards are in each Nat Geo Unit, and as you use your professional judgement on which Nat Geo Units to teach this year, use the alignment document to assist you in identifying which essential standards you have taught and which might still need to be addressed.
An example of how to use the alignment document (3rd grade example):
1) If I was starting with Nat Geo Unit 1 for my third grade class, as I prepared to teach Unit 1, I’d use the alignment document to highlight the pages in the teacher edition that reference the BT essential standards, not just for standards in Benchmark 1, but for all the pages across all the standards shown to be in Unit 1. Again, Nat Geo is unit based, so it’s not going to be a clean correlation with the BT calendar for ELA this year. For the other content areas (math, sci, etc.), the BT calendar should still be very useful.
2) Once I had all those pages highlighted in my teacher edition for Unit 1, as I taught Unit 1, I would make sure to really take my time teaching whatever activities or content was on those highlight pages, because I would now know those highlighted areas in Unit 1 are aligned to the essential Arizona standards. If, based on my professional judgement, I decided to skip parts of Unit 1, I’d try to avoid skipping parts of Unit 1 that had areas highlighted.
3) After I finished teaching Unit 1, using the alignment document I could tell that Unit 1 didn’t address some of the BT identified essential standards. For example, looking over the alignment document, 3.R.RF.03ab and 3.R.RL.06 are not addressed in Unit 1. I would then want to make sure to either teach a Nat Geo Unit that does address these essential standards, like Unit 4, or find some materials in BT in teach that standard.
4) Realistically, I doubt you will have the time to teach every single Nat Geo Unit (I think in most cases there are 8 Units per grade), so the alignment document can also assist you in deciding which Unit to skip if you have to skip a unit. For 3rd grade it appears a lot of the Arizona essential standards are taught in Unit 8, so if I thought I might run out of time during the year before I was able to get to Unit 8, I might decide to teach Unit 8 earlier in the year and skip some other Nat Geo Unit.
5) Finally, based on whatever assessments I was using (end of Nat Geo Unit tests, MAP scores), I could identify which standards my students were still struggling to master, and make note of where those standards are taught in other Nat Geo Units so I could make sure to take time really teaching those parts in the future Nat Geo Units.
Just an FYI, the alignment document is based of Nat Geo’s correlation document which you can access here: http://ngl.cengage.com/correlations/
We combined what is found here with the BT calendars.
If you decide to use this, please type in “Arizona” where it says “Standard/State/Country Name” and then type in either “Reach” “Inside” or “Edge” where it says “Program Name”.