Beyond Textbooks works by tapping into the collective knowledge of professional educators across the state.

Curriculum Calendars

First, we take the proven “essential standards”and curriculum calendars from the Vail School District. These “essential standards” insure that teachers are focused on the areas that demonstrate academic mastery at a given grade level. The curriculum calendars insure that educators teach the necessary material before the AIMS test, and that all students are given access to the same curriculum.

Web-based Resources and Planning

Next, educators use the online curriculum calendars to link to standards based curriculum documents, assessments, and instructional resources. These linked curriculum documents and resources provide what you need, when you need it lesson planning assistance.

The curriculum documents offer valuable insight to the standards to be taught. These insights include:

• Vocab, Skills, and Level of Understanding
• The Big Ideas
• Essential Questions for Understanding
• Performance Tasks and Model Products to prove mastery beyond a test

The instructional resources include:

• Lesson Plans
• PowerPoint™ Presentations
• Teacher created worksheets, graphic organizers, quizzes, and more
• Weblinks to videos, flash games, online activities, and more…

Of course, if there isn’t a resource that fits your style of teaching add your own resources to the web page.

Professional Sharing

One of the best parts of Beyond Textbooks is the ability to share professional knowledge easily with teachers in your school, your district, or across the state. Using sophisticated web technologies, educators can easily post resources to the Beyond Textbooks website. Experience has shown the best people to filter through curricular resources are the teachers who have used them.