Washington, D.C. Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12)
Washington, D.C. Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12)
Finished units for DC classrooms, written to the concepts the DC Standards describe: worksheets at four levels, an editable slide deck, complete answer keys and a lesson plan with timings, downloadable straight away.
Begin with one unit →Resources that fit
Units DC teachers can use tomorrow
Open with the SEL reflection craft for a K–4 room, then the street art, photography and Romantic landscape units for secondary art, and finish with the fourteen-studio bundle if you need a year of work.
Why teachers here use these
Why teachers across DC use these
Teaching in the District means teaching inside two systems at once. Nearly half of DC's public-school students attend public charter schools, the rest attend DCPS, and both sectors report to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education for assessment purposes. Curriculum choices, pacing calendars and prep time differ enormously from one campus to the next, but DC CAPE lands the same way for everyone in grades 3 through 8 and in the named high school courses. For a teacher, that mix has a practical cost: students arrive mid-year from a school that sequenced the content differently, so a class in October can hold three versions of what was covered last spring. Small campuses compound it by putting several grade levels in front of one specialist and giving that person a cart instead of a room. A finished unit with four tiers absorbs most of that. You are handing the same concept to a wide range of prior knowledge without writing four sets of materials to do it.
A sequence you can run
One download, five lessons deep
The sequence assumes a mixed starting point rather than a clean one, so the first lesson diagnoses what students bring and the later lessons widen or narrow accordingly.
- Find out what they already haveThe opening task asks students to respond to the image with no vocabulary supplied. What they write tells you within ten minutes which prior knowledge is actually in the room.
- Set the shared vocabularyThe deck introduces the terms everyone will use for the rest of the unit. Doing it here rather than on day one means the words land on something students have already looked at.
- Assign the tier, not the packetEach student gets one of four versions of the same task. The room works on one concept at four depths, and nobody is handed a sheet marked as the easy one.
- Apply it to something newA second artwork, a second attempt, no scaffolding. This is where transfer shows up, and where you find the students who need the concept taught a different way.
- Produce a piece worth keepingThe final written task is designed to be marked and filed. It gives you dated evidence of what a student can do, which matters when the class list keeps changing.
What's covered
What every unit includes
Each download is a whole teaching package built for real periods, and everything in it can be cut, renamed or reordered before it reaches a class.
- Worksheets at four levels
- Editable slide deck
- Complete answer keys
- Lesson plan with timings
- Printable and digital formats
- Word and PowerPoint files
Make it work in your building
For mixed rooms and support plans
Written work matters more when students move between schools. A child who transfers across the city in January arrives with a transcript and very little else, and the teacher receiving them has to work out quickly what is actually there. Units that end in a marked written task give both teachers something concrete: a dated response to a known question, on the same underlying task the rest of the class answered, at whichever tier the student worked. It reads far better in an eligibility meeting or a support plan review than a participation grade does, and it gives a parent something specific to look at when the conversation turns to what their child can do rather than which school they came from.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
Do these carry any official DC endorsement?
None, and we would rather say so first. These are independent teaching resources, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE). Each unit is written to the concepts and skills described in the DC Standards for its subject and grade band, so the vocabulary and tasks should match what you already teach. Check the preview against your school's own scope and sequence before buying — in a city where curricula vary by campus, that check matters.
How do these relate to DC CAPE?
They sit alongside it rather than aiming at it. DC CAPE (DC Comprehensive Assessments of Progress in Education) covers grades 3 through 8 and specific high school courses, and it replaced PARCC, which the District used from 2015 to 2023. The units here build close reading, subject vocabulary and extended written explanation, which are habits those assessments draw on. We publish no practice items, sell no test prep, and make no claim about scores of any kind.
My class sits between two grade bands. Which unit do I buy?
Buy the band your students read at rather than the one on their timetable. The four tiers stretch a unit roughly a year in either direction: use the lower two levels and project the deck to bring a high school unit down to middle school, or take the top tier plus the open brief to push a middle school unit up. Preview pages give the reading load, which decides it.
Can I use the tasks as graded evidence?
Yes, and that is how most teachers here treat them. Each unit closes with a written task that has a clear question and a full answer key, so the result is markable rather than anecdotal, and every tier answers the same underlying question. That makes a set of responses comparable across a mixed class and usable later — at a conference, in a placement or accommodations meeting, or when a receiving teacher asks what a transferring student has actually covered.
Can our department look at a unit in PD time?
Yes. Departments and charter networks often open one unit during planning time to walk the sequence, compare the four tiers, or agree how a concept gets introduced across sections. The licence covers the purchasing teacher and their own classes, so colleagues who go on to teach from the material need their own copies. A bundle bought once for a team works out cheaper per teacher than several separate unit purchases.
Half my class transferred in this year. Will a unit like this help?
That is the situation these tiers are built for. Because DC students move between charter schools and DCPS during the year, a single class can contain several different versions of last year's curriculum, and reteaching everything from scratch costs weeks you do not have. Handing four levels of one task lets the newcomers work on the same concept as everyone else at a depth they can manage, and the opening diagnostic tells you where each of them actually stands.
Fourteen studios in one download
The complete middle school art bundle sequences fourteen hands-on studios across Grades 5–9, enough to plan a full year from.
See the studio bundle →