Writing

Writer's Workshop Curriculum

We are teaching the Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing, a workshop curriculum. Written for children on the cusp of writing more academic texts, the fourth-grade units familiarizes students with the genres they will regularly encounter throughout school—thesis-driven persuasive essays, literary essays, and research reports. Each of the units begins where children are and then provides a progression of instruction that brings students step by step toward increasing proficiency.

THIS WRITING CURRICULUM:

  • teaches opinion, information, and narrative writing with increasing complexity
  • fosters high-level thinking, including regular chances to synthesize, analyze, and critique
  • develops and refines strategies for content-area writing
  • supports greater independence and fluency
  • conducts strategic performance assessments (on-demands) to help monitor students’ progress and differentiate instruction
  • provides a ladder of exemplar texts that model writing progressions across grades.

Unit Guide

Unit 1: The Arc of Story (Narrative)

  • Personal Narrative
  • Mini-unit: study mentor texts to analyze craft moves
  • Realistic Fiction

Students learn that the lenses they bring to reading fiction can also be brought to writing fiction, as they develop believable characters with struggles and motivations and rich stories to tell.

Unit 2: Boxes and Bullets (Opinion)

  • Personal essay
  • Persuasive essay

Students learn the value of organization and form as they gather evidence to support and express an opinion on topics they know well.

Unit 3: The Literary Essay (Opinion)

  • Literary essay
  • Compare/contrast literary essay

Students build on their learning of essay writing and apply it with increasing sophistication to a unit on literary essays—that is, writing about fiction.

Unit 4: Test Preparation for SBAC (CAASPP) Writing

During the assessment, students will be asked to answer short responses and extended constructed responses that are text-based. Students are asked to write in a variety of ways on this assessment, and this unit is meant to prepare students for the variety of ways they will be asked to write on the assessment.

Unit 5: Bringing History to Life (Informational)

Students are ready to tackle historical research in which they collect evidence and use details to vividly describe people and events long ago and far away.

Assessments

Resources