This introduction to the reading workshop invites children to feel and act like readers. The goal is for children to finish this unit with a confident sense of reading identity. Students will see, experience, and understand how books are filled with information and stories that they can read and share with others. Through this unit, they will learn to love to read while they also learn how to read. Children will learn concepts-of- print as well as receive an introduction to good reading habits. Children can learn to notice and name what is on the pages, they can look at a picture thinking, “What does this page say?” to generate stories to accompany these pictures. As readers, students will begin to apply their developing reading knowledge including knowledge of letter-sound correspondence, comprehension, and fluency.
Students will continue to practice the habits of readers that they have been developing: sitting quietly with books, choosing lots of books at a time, and discussing books with partners. They will also continue to 'warm up' before reading by looking at the front and back of the books they select and do picture walks. In this unit, readers will learn to pay close attention to the words they are reading as well as look at the pictures to help make meaning from the words. Children will apply their developing word study knowledge and use cues to continue to develop as a reader.
This unit is designed to support the work of readers as they begin to explore books of increasing difficulty. They will study the ways in which books are becoming harder (noticing patterns across books), and use their knowledge of letters, sounds, and the structure of stories and language to solve tricky words. Additionally, this unit places a particular emphasis on reading high-frequency words with automaticity, and on thinking and talking about books—critical components of reading at level C and beyond. Ultimately, the goal of this unit is to support the orchestration of ALL the strategies they have developed over the course of the school year to read more complex books with accuracy, fluency, and comprehension.
Unit 4: Becoming Avid Readers
This unit is designed to highlight the readers that students have developed into throughout the year. They are no longer just readers - they are avid readers! This unit focuses less on new skills, and more on making sure that what the children have learned has been internalized and automatic. Immersed in books, poetry and songs, children are encouraged to take more responsibility in making decisions about what and how to read. Across these multiple contexts, they will practice and solidify learning, paying close attention to characters, setting, and plot while reading fictional stories, becoming experts in nonfiction topics, and playing with rhyme and rhythm while reading poetry.
Writing begins with oral telling of stories. This foundational unit builds on what children already know how to do and lays the groundwork for writing workshop. As students begin telling stories, they learn about each other and through talk, the young writers learn that talk can help us think through a story and lead to more detailed stories.
Kindergartners enter school ready to read and write like big kids, to learn alongside classmates, and to take the world by storm. This first unit capitalizes on that excitement and channels it into writing all-about books and stories. Simultaneously, children will learn what it means to be part of a writing workshop and the roles they are to play in all the various parts of a writing workshop. As part of this, they will learn how to work with each other as partners--planning together, sharing drafts, giving each other help. They will learn to ask and answer questions about texts, and they’ll begin to develop ideas about authors, illustrators, and genres. This launching unit is critical in establishing clear structures that children will carry with them throughout the year.
In this unit students will study the connections between the work we do as readers and the work we do as writers, all the while writing true stories of moments from their lives. The teachers will revisit many of the strategies children learned when learning to write true stories in ways that make them interesting as well as easy to read - giving them ample practice with the process of drawing and revising. The students will continue to practice the rich storytelling work students engaged in at the start of the year. Wherever the students are on the progression towards conventional writing, the teacher will help writers to explore ways to write, revise, and refine their writing.
In this unit, the students learn how to teach something to an audience by drawing and writing a sequence of steps. They will learn that one purpose of writing is to teach others. Children will understand that writers not only use their writing to tell the rich stories of their lives, or to label their environment or to celebrate others, but also to teach others. As informational text writers, they will tap into their inner expert, notice the procedure and steps involved in things they do, consider their audience as well as their purpose for writing, revise texts to make them better, and share.
Kindergarteners writers will learn that they can write to make their classroom, their school, and their world into a better place. They have been writing particular kinds of texts for specific real audiences, and in this unit, the children will do lots and lots of persuasive writing. They begin by writing signs, songs, petitions, and letters about problems they see in their classroom and their school, and then they address problems they identify in the larger world of their neighborhood. As they progress towards addressing concerns that are not right underfoot, they tackle slightly more distant topics and address more distant audiences, they meanwhile also learn more about persuasive writing and writing in general.