Curriculum Connection

Readers will focus on retelling emergent storybooks that they are familiar with. They will work with a partner to share, retell, and discuss characters and main events in their stories.

Emergent storybooks are memorable but not necessarily memorizable, have repeated language and dialogue, include high picture support and are pleasurable to read over and over again.

This unit channels students to transfer and apply their knowledge of letters and sounds to labeling items and listing observations. It is designed to teach children that writing is not only a tool for storytelling; it is also a tool for learning about science.

Students will “read the world,” collect natural items and create booklets of representational drawings with labels and, possibly, sentences, to capture the details with precision, while referencing nonfiction books when appropriate.

This unit will teach students strategies to understand and figure out words so that they are able to read more challenging books. It is the goal for students to become active problem solvers when reading; therefore, their reading stamina will increase.

In this opinion writing unit, first-graders learn that people sort, rank, categorize, explain, convince, persuade, argue, give in, change and are changed. Children will learn to write their judgments and their reasons for those judgments and to organize their reasons and supply supporting details

for those reasons.

Students will write review after review, writing these about anything and everything: toys, restaurants, video games, and the works. You might involve your students in reviews on restaurants, books or kid-friendly places to play. The unit ends with children learning to write book reviews. They’ll summarize, evaluate, judge and defend their judgments. Students will work on individual projects that convince others to read and be interested in the books they are reading.

The main focus of this unit is to refresh different comprehension strategies readers use to read with purpose and intention, as well as review how strong readers monitor their reading to check for understanding. Students will utilize comprehension strategies such as predicting, retelling and making connections to read with purpose. Students will understand that readers ask questions for different purposes.

They will ask questions before, during, and after reading and then determine whether their questions can be answered or not.

Students will continue to write narratives as they learn from authors' craft. Students will be asked to name their intentions as writers- what they hope their readers will feel- and revise on the go. Students will also study why an author uses a particular craft move and will revise, paying attention to word choice and language.

Children will make reading and writing connections drawing on everything they have learned up until this point to discover craft moves in books they are reading on their own and to apply these to their own writing.

2nd Grade Writing Sample

Overview of Unit: In this unit, students will read to learn by choosing topics they are already passionate about and seeking to learn even more than they may already know. This unit spotlights skills and habits essential to readers of expository nonfiction: reading with a pencil, determining importance, finding supporting details to go with the main idea; figuring out and using new content-specific vocabulary; and comparing and contrasting information learned across texts.

Overview of Unit: This unit builds upon the skills students have learned as writers of information in 2nd grade. It is centered on a particular type of information writing--a structured, written-to-teach, expert-based project. Students will learn to write introductions, organize information, and include text features that help their readers and will also be taught many different ways to elaborate on their topics through the use of facts, definitions, and other important details, but also through the use of descriptions and anecdotes.

By the end of the unit, students will be pushed toward independence and transference.

Readers, today you will read three texts to learn more about motor racing. Read texts 1 and 2, then answer questions 1 and 2 on a separate sheet of paper. Then read the rest and finish up.

Overview of Unit: Children will be taught to read intensely to grow ideas about their characters. They will learn that the heart of a good story lies within the character. You will work to get your students’ enthusiasm built for growing substantial ideas grounded in evidence. To do this, we will teach readers to read closely and with conscious intent. Many fourth graders enter the year reading only to grasp the sweeping details of a text.

One of the first messages we’ll send in this unit is that as they move into more complex texts, they’ll find the details in those texts matter.

Overview of Unit: In this unit, students will be crafting realistic fiction stories as a form of narrative writing. This is the first time in their elementary education that students will write realistic fiction. Fourth grade students have had many experiences writing personal narratives, so while you will lean on those experiences to guide the teaching of this unit, students will be thinking about narrative writing in a whole new way.

3rd, 4th and 5th grade units have pre-assessments and post assessments available for teachers to see growth within in a unit in Reading. Interpreting Characters pre-assessment Example

On-Demands should be given in writing before each unit to determine where areas of growth are needed determined by the rubric. Rubric for Narrative Writing

Overview of Unit: As this unit opens, you will help students see that just as they have spent the summer growing too tall for their blue jeans and too big for their old sneakers, so too are they ready to make a growth spurt in reading. You’ll challenge them to rise to the occasion of fifth grade by choosing to read novels that are worthy of serious, thoughtful reading and by bringing all they know from their entire school career to the work of reading those novels deeply. Whereas in prior years, the writing about reading that students do early in the year has mostly been confined to Post-its (lest it overwhelm them from getting a volume of reading going), this year, you’ll spotlight the importance of writing about reading right from the start.

Overview of Unit: In this unit, students will be crafting a personal narrative, paying special attention to elaboration through detail and description, traveling slowly over the ideas of their topic, grounding the writing in a wealth of specificity and returning to important sections to tell them in a bit-by-bit way. In order to do this well, students will be expected to bring their interpretation skills to their own emerging drafts to ensure they are highlighting the central ideas that they want readers to draw from their text and become decision makers. By knowing this they will be able to make intentional craft decisions with the author's purpose in mind.

Readers, today you will read a story called “Stray” by Cynthia Rylant. Then you will watch a video called “Michigan Football Team Embraces Special Player.” After you read the story and watch the video, you will be asked to stop and answer a few questions. Write your answers on a separate sheet of paper.