You have the new curriculum document. You do not have the materials.

This is the ordinary case, not the unlucky one. Ontario released its rewritten Language curriculum in late June for a September start, and the province's largest elementary union called that timeline absurd and asked for a two-year implementation window. In Australia, the Grattan Institute's 2022 Ending the Lesson Lottery survey found that only 15% of schools had a shared bank of high-quality curriculum materials covering all their year levels — and disadvantaged schools were about half as likely to have one — a finding that has become a standing justification for the national push on shared materials. In India, new NCERT textbooks have been arriving class by class since 2024, with teacher training reaching only a fraction of the teachers who have to use them.

Different countries, same week in a teacher's life: the requirement has changed, the resourcing has not caught up, and the class arrives on Monday regardless.

The instinct is to go looking. Open a tab, search the unit name, start collecting. It feels like progress because it produces files. But at the end of two hours you have eleven resources of unknown alignment and still no answer to the only question that matters this week, which is what am I actually teaching on Tuesday.

Here is a better first two hours.

Don't search. Sort.

Before you find anything, sort what the unit demands into four buckets. You are not planning yet. You are deciding where planning is even needed.

Bucket	The question	What it produces
Required	What does this unit oblige me to teach, in the curriculum's own words?	A short, honest list — usually shorter than you feared
Re-point	What do I already have that teaches this, if I change the framing, the example, or the task?	Your cheapest wins
Build	What genuinely has nothing behind it?	The only pile that costs real time
Wait	What is required, but not required now?	Permission to stop

Most of a "new" unit is not new. Curriculum rewrites reorganise, re-sequence, re-emphasise and re-word far more often than they introduce content that has never been taught before. The sorting is what reveals that. Searching hides it, because every search result looks like something you need.

Required: use the document's language, not your summary of it

Open the actual curriculum text — the expectations, the content descriptions, the learning outcomes, whatever your jurisdiction calls them — and copy the wording verbatim into your list. Do not paraphrase yet.

Two reasons. First, the verbs are the assessment. A statement that says students explain is a different lesson, and a different piece of evidence, from one that says students identify. That difference survives every rewrite and every set of missing materials. Second, when a colleague, a coach or a parent asks why you taught something a particular way, verbatim wording is the answer. A paraphrase is an opinion.

You will typically find that the required list for a unit is between six and fifteen lines. That is the whole obligation. Everything else in the unit is a choice you are making about how to meet it.

Re-point: change the wrapper, keep the material

This is where most of the unit gets resolved, and it is the step people skip because it doesn't feel like planning.

Take last year's materials and ask, one at a time: does this task produce the evidence the new wording asks for? Often the answer is yes with a small edit:

The task is fine but the prompt asks students to list where the new expectation asks them to justify. Change the prompt.
The worked example is fine but sits in a context the new curriculum moved away from. Change the context, not the maths.
The reading is fine but the questions test recall where the new wording wants comparison. Rewrite four questions.
The assessment is fine but its criteria describe the old verbs. Rewrite the criteria; keep the task.

Each of those is ten to twenty minutes and re-points something that already works in your room, with your class, at your reading level. A resource you find online has none of that fit and still needs the same editing.

Be honest at this step, though. If the material teaches something adjacent rather than the thing, moving it to Re-point is how a unit quietly ends up not covered. When in doubt, read the verb again.

Build: pick one, not five

Whatever survives into Build is real. It also has to be rationed, because you have two hours and not twenty.

Choose one thing to build properly for the first fortnight of the unit, and make it the piece that everything else can hang off. In practice that is usually one of three:

The anchor task — the substantial thing students do that produces the unit's main evidence. If this is good, weak days around it still land somewhere.
The worked example — the one demonstration that makes the hard idea visible. Build it slowly and reuse it in four lessons.
The checkpoint — the short mid-unit check that tells you whether to move on. Build this if the unit's content is familiar but its standard is not, which is the usual situation after a rewrite.

Build one. Not one of each.

Wait: name it, date it, stop thinking about it

The last bucket is the one that gives the first three any chance of working. Some of what the unit requires is genuinely required later — a second cycle, a later term, an assessment that only makes sense after two more topics.

Write those down with a month next to them, in the same place you'll look when you plan that month. That is the whole technique. An obligation you have written down and dated stops occupying the part of your attention that should be on Tuesday. An obligation you are merely aware of does not.

A worked example

Here is the triage on a representative unit — a middle-years science unit on energy transfer, rewritten so that the emphasis moved from describing energy forms to explaining transfers in a real system. (This is a composite example, not a specific jurisdiction's unit; the shape is what transfers, not the content.)

Required (verbatim from the document, abbreviated): explain how energy is transferred in a given system; represent transfers using an appropriate model; evaluate a claim about energy efficiency using evidence.

Re-point: last year's energy-forms sorting activity becomes a five-minute retrieval starter rather than a lesson. The circuits practical is untouched, but the write-up prompt changes from describe what happened to explain where the energy went, and how you know. The textbook diagram stays; the questions under it get rewritten to ask students to compare two models rather than label one.

Build: the anchor task. Students take one real appliance or system, model the transfers, and evaluate an efficiency claim made about it in marketing copy. This is new, it produces evidence for all three required lines at once, and it is worth two hours of your time.

Wait: the extended investigation and its full write-up. Required, but it needs the modelling to be secure first. Dated for the following term.

Total time: one afternoon. Coverage: complete and defensible. Number of downloaded resources of unknown provenance: zero.

Write down what you learned, while it's cheap

The last five minutes are the ones that make next year different. On the same page, note three things:

which Re-point edits worked, and which turned out to be wishful;
what the Build actually took, in hours, against what you estimated;
which required line was hardest to get evidence for.

A rewritten curriculum is not a one-off event. Ontario has committed to a five-year review cycle; Australia's states are staging subject areas across several years; India's textbook replacement runs class by class to 2028. You will do this triage again. The note is what stops you doing it from scratch.

Where this leaves you

None of this creates the materials that should have arrived with the document. It is triage, and triage is what you do when the resourcing is late and the students are on time. What it does is convert an overwhelming unit into a short required list, a pile of cheap edits, one thing worth building, and a dated list of things that are allowed to wait.

If you want to work through it on paper, the four columns are the whole tool: Required / Re-point / Build / Wait. Copy them onto the front of the unit and sort before you search.

Almanack exists for the Build column — turning a curriculum expectation you've already identified into a task, a worked example, or a checkpoint you can then edit for your actual room. The sorting, and the judgement about what can wait, stays yours; it always did.

Your curriculum changed and the materials didn't arrive. Here's how to triage the first unit.