Unit 1: The Stories We Tell
Students explore how authors create stories and use different ways of communicating to help readers understand characters, events, and important messages.

In this unit, students will:

• Explore different text modes, including print, digital, auditory, spoken, visual, and multimodal texts

• Identify an author’s purpose and intended audience

• Identify characters, setting, major events, problem, solution, and dialogue

• Describe how characters respond to challenges and how their responses connect to a story’s central message, lesson, or moral

• Identify first-person and third-person points of view

• Explore how text features help organize and add meaning to texts

• Recognize the difference between literal and figurative language

• Use descriptive language to make writing more engaging

• Use transition words to sequence events and actions

• Compare different versions of the same story

• Write narratives about real or imagined experiences with a clear ending

• Create and share information using more than one mode of communication

• Use specific parts of a text to support ideas, answers, and opinions

Students will also strengthen:

• Phonics skills for reading and spelling, including consonant blends, digraphs, vowel patterns, and two-syllable words

• Reading fluency, accuracy, expression, and self-correction

• Vocabulary through context clues, root words, prefixes, and suffixes

• Common, proper, and irregular plural nouns

• Personal pronouns

• Capitalization and ending punctuation

• Simple and compound sentences and different sentence types

• Subject-verb agreement

• Handwriting, spacing, and writing fluency

Unit 2: Knowledge Quest

Students explore how authors use informational texts to teach readers about a topic and how facts, details, text features, and other techniques help communicate information clearly.

In this unit, students will:

• Explore different text modes, including print, digital, auditory, spoken, visual, and multimodal texts

• Identify an author’s purpose and intended audience

• Identify first-person and third-person points of view

• Explain how text features, such as captions, headings, charts, and indexes, help organize and add meaning to texts

• Use text features to make their own writing clearer

• Use transition words to connect and sequence ideas

• Identify the main idea and key supporting details in informational texts

• Explain connections between historical events, scientific ideas, or steps in a process

• Write informational texts that introduce a topic, include facts and definitions, and provide a conclusion

• Ask questions and conduct simple research using multiple sources

• Organize and share accurate information in different ways

• Use specific parts of a text to support ideas and answers

• Explore information from print, digital, and personal sources and make connections across topics

Students will also strengthen:

• Phonics skills for reading and spelling, including consonant blends, digraphs, vowel patterns, and two-syllable words

• Reading fluency, accuracy, expression, and self-correction

• Vocabulary through context clues, root words, prefixes, and suffixes

• Using glossaries and beginning dictionaries to determine word meanings

• Adjectives and adverbs

• Common, proper, and irregular plural nouns

• Determiners, such as articles and possessive words

• Capitalization, ending punctuation, and commas

• Simple and compound sentences and different sentence types

• Subject-verb agreement

• Handwriting, spacing, and writing fluency

Unit 3: The Way I See It

Unit 4: Wise Words

Unit 5: Everything Changes

Unit 6: Language Leaps