Why can we build great units but not a year that hangs together?
You keep arranging units like furniture, hoping the room will start to look like a house. It won't. A pile of good rooms is not a house until someone decides what the house is for. Here is the honest problem: you have not agreed, out loud, as a team, on the single thread a student could point to in September and still point to in June. Without that thread, every sequencing choice is a guess dressed up as a plan. This is not a bigger curriculum problem. It is a smaller, harder one. It takes an hour of real argument, not another planning weekend.
Your units are fine. What's missing is the one sentence every student should be able to say in June about what the whole year was for. Name that sentence together before you sequence anything else — the order will follow the spine, not the other way around.
What changes unlock by starting
- One shared sentence your whole team can say the same way, describing what the year builds toward
- A unit order that follows from that sentence instead of from habit or convenience
- Fewer units, chosen on purpose, instead of more units chosen by accident
- A team that can catch drift mid-year instead of discovering it in June