• Unit 1, Personal Narrative: Crafting Powerful Life Stories helps students write true stories, learning strategies to generate meaningful story ideas, manage pace, elaborate on important scenes, and deepen insights.
• In Unit 2, Research-Based Information Writing: Books, Websites, and Presentations, sixth graders learn ways to research and write informational essays, books, and digital presentations or websites to teach their readers about a topic, using increasingly sophisticated ways to draw on and structure information to explain a position or make a call to action.
• In Unit 3, The Literary Essay: From Character to Compare/Contrast, sixth graders craft essays that make arguments about characters and themes, learning strategies essayists use to gather, analyze, and explain evidence from the text to support their claims.
Students arrive in our classrooms as active and even avid users of language. But if they are to perform and thrive in academic and real-world settings, they must develop the stamina, tenacity, and habits of lifelong readers and writers. These foundational studies focus on creating the contexts and tools that make that learning possible. Topics include setting up literacy notebooks, establishing independent reading projects, and exposing students to the problem-solving strategies and practices of avid readers and published authors.
These grade-level introductory studies are specifically designed to provide students with in-depth orientations to the development of text-based arguments about literature. Students engage in carefully sequenced and integrated cycles of reading, rereading, writing, and discussion that culminate in formal, written arguments about engaging and important pieces of short fiction.
Each microcourse contains two units. In the first unit, students work with thematically linked pairs of complex informational texts to determine the central ideas and to analyze how they unfold over the course of a text. Students also work to describe and understand the language and methods writers employ to develop content. In the second unit, students work with complex literary nonfiction to build the skills and tenacity acquired only by encounters with difficult texts. In both units, students experience sequences of reading, writing, and discussion specifically designed to ensure support, engagement, and success in culminating writing tasks.
It isn’t enough for students to merely comprehend informational texts. To navigate a world brimming with information and argument, students need critical instincts and know-how. These microcourses invite students to create “reading like a detective” theories that they test and refine through progressions of experiments in reading nonfiction. The key in all of this work is engagement: Detective fiction by Carl Hiaasen and Roald Dahl, reportage by award-winning writers including Michael Pollan and Jonathan Kozol, and cutting edge ideas about how our language and worldviews are shaped by metaphor—these texts and ideas ensure “reading below the surface” experiences for students that are, at once, empowering and illuminating.