About the Grade 3 Units

The third-grade units were written to support the crucial transition children make from learning to read to reading to learn. The opening unit, Building a Reading Life, launches your students’ lives as upper elementary school readers. Children ramp up their reading skills by immersing themselves in within-reach fiction books while working on word solving, vocabulary development, and more. The second unit, Reading to Learn: Grasping Main Ideas and Text Structures, addresses essential skills for reading expository nonfiction, such as ascertaining main ideas, recognizing text infrastructure, comparing texts, and thinking critically, as well as the skills for reading narrative nonfiction, such as determining importance by using knowledge of story structure. The third unit, Character Studies, lures children into fiction books, teaching them to closely observe characters and sharpen their skills in interpretation. The final unit, Research Clubs: Elephants, Penguins, and Frogs, Oh My!, shows youngsters how to turn to texts as their teachers. Children work in clubs to gather, synthesize, and organize information about animals, and then use this information to seek solutions to real-world problems.

About the Grade 4 Units

In fourth grade, children will delve into complex texts and see significance in details. In the first unit, Interpreting Characters: The Heart of the Story, children study the complexity of characters and explore themes while developing skills such as inference and interpretation. In the second unit, Reading the Weather, Reading the World, children form research teams to delve into topics about extreme weather and natural disasters while developing their skills in cross-text synthesis, practicing close reading, comparing and contrasting, and evaluating sources to determine credibility. Children take on the challenge of researching history in the third unit, Reading History: The American Revolution. Children study multiple points of view, support a position with reasons and evidence, tackle complex texts, and learn strategies for using new domain-specific words. In the final unit for fourth grade, Historical Fiction Clubs, children practice reading analytically, synthesizing complicated narratives, comparing and contrasting themes, and incorporating nonfiction research into their reading.