I am on a block schedule where I teach the entire year in one semester. (We are on a block schedule, but we meet every day and then my course will end in January.) I had it all planned out, but then we had some fires and closed school for 2 weeks. Now I have all the lessons in Unit 5 Chapter 2 to complete in one week. So I have Unit 5 lessons 11-17 and 5 days of block classes to complete them. Any suggestions on what I should cut or remove? This is my first year teaching the course.
I am sorry to hear that! I hope I can help by giving just some ideas. It sounds like you aren’t too far off. My understanding is that 1 week in “block” schedule is like 2 weeks in a “traditional” school schedule - so you have students for ~10 hours? Is that right?
If so you are in good shape - you can certainly do lessons 11-16 during that time. Lesson 17 is good, but not needed for the AP exam.
Other teachers who have gotten stuck have also opted to teach arrays and functions with return values without the computer component - essentially showing students paper examples of these topics and just practicing predicting output of code that processes arrays and functions with return values. If your school would allow it, you are up for it, and kids would be interested, you could hold an “AP cram session” in the spring for an hour or two to talk about those topics. That would just leave you with 11-14 to do now which seems really do-able.
Does that help?
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Yes that helps, thank you!
@lalamillo, hi I am teaching APCSP in the 2nd half of our 4x4 block schedule (Jan 20-May 20). Di you come up with a pacing guide for your schedule?
I pretty much did one lesson a day. Many of the lessons in code.org were over two days and so doing them in one day worked in the block schedule. I ended up with a very shortened class because we had fires that closed our schools for a week and a half. I ended up skipping a lot in unit 5, and they were fine for the AP test (or so they tell me, they said the test was easy, but don’t have their scores yet). So you can do it and save the second half of unit 5 for the end of your class. Good luck!