Looking back at my journey in IB, I think this was the most challenging aspect when I first started at this IB school. This was a whole new way of planning, compared to what I have experienced before. Unfortunately I had no documents to work from, as the specialist subjects had not started doing these unit plans when I arrived. So, I had the homeroom teacher's unit plans to work from and also whatever I could find from the OCC at the time. 

​

From what I have learned, these unit plans only need to be created if your are delivering stand alone units, which are units that have no link to the unit of inquiry that they are learning in the homeroom. If you do have a link, then you just have to add your planning to the master document, which in our school was kept by the homeroom teachers. Although, the links should have been made at the start of they year with a whole overview of the year, we were constantly chasing and were doing the planning on a quartely basis.

​

I was still very confused on how to write a good unit plan but having checked Andy's website (www.pypwithandy.com), it gave me a better idea of what needed to go into each section. Now, when I thought about it, I had 6 units per year across one grade level and we had 8 grade levels, Creche and Reception, through to Grade 6.  This potentially meant writing 48 unit plans. Obviously, there won't be that many, as some of our units had links and we could contribute our planning with the master document.

​

I ran an idea with my coordinator to combine grade levels of the same unit into one plan. So for example; the unit of athletics across grades 4 to 6. The other one would be athletics from reception to grade 3. The only reason it was organised like this was because we had an unofficial lower and upper pyp and this is how the grade levels were split. This idea was approved and supported by my coordinator so I ran with it. I was told that this idea would only be possible if the transdisciplinary theme remained consistant through the grade levels in the unit plan. 

​

I managed to find an example from OCC with the same idea, which gave me a little more confidence that I was on the right path. I started the planning for the units (see example in the attachment below) and as I like colour, I colour coded each grade so it was easier to follow. Once I finished, I had two different coordinators look at the document, which they approved and they decided to roll this idea across the other specialist subjects. It was also reviewed and acknowledged by the evaluation team, when we went through the PYP evaluation (YAY - sigh of relief). 

​

Just to make it easier, we created the unit plans for every unit, whether they were linked or not. However, if they were linked, we would just copy and paste it into the master document. So in total, we had 12 unit plans for the whole of PYP PE.

 

I would really like some feedback on this to see if other practitioners have done it like this or any another way. I hope it helps those who were in the same situation as me and hopefully, it will save you a lot of time. 

​

PYP 456 Athletics Unit plan: https://tinyurl.com/jjmmy3y

​

​