Unit 1: Building a Reading Life

Children will ramp up their reading skills by immersing themselves in within-reach fiction books while working on word solving, vocabulary development, envision, and prediction.

• Children will read in the company of partners to talk and listen about their reading

• Children will set goals and track reading progress through the use of a reading log

• Children will ask questions of themselves and the text to uncover deeper meaning

• Children will read longer and stronger complex texts

Unit 2: Mystery: Foundational Skills in Disguise

This unit will help support close and inferential reading and teach readers to synthesize across chapters. Readers can drive predictions using clues.

• Children will read and take notes to understand the mystery by predicting suspects, opportunities, and motives

• Children will become better mystery readers by finding hidden clues through deeper thinking about their reading

• Children will apply the elements of mysteries to all fiction including setting, plot, and characters

Unit 3: Reading to Learn: Grasping Main Ideas and Text Structure

Children will explore essential skills for reading expository nonfiction, such main ideas, recognizing text structure, comparing texts, and thinking critically.

• Children will learn about how nonfiction texts are organized to better understand meaning.

• Children will use narrative nonfiction (biography) lenses to a broader range of texts.

• Children will learn to differentiate their opinion from the author’s perspective and have conversations about them.

Unit 4: Character Studies

Children will become experts with fiction books, teaching them to closely observe characters, making predictions, and learning lifelong lessons, and compare/contrast characters across books.

• Children will get to know a character as a friend by noticing how a character talks and acts, noticing patterns to grow theories and make predictions

• Children will learn to follow a character’s journey through a story mountain by noticing the character’s problem, how it is resolved, as well as paying attention to secondary characters

• Children will take their reading to the next level by comparing characters, their problems and the lessons characters learn

Unit 5: Target Teaching

Children will reflect and bring forward all they have learned in each genre in order to demonstrate understanding of skills and strategies.

• Children will apply appropriate strategies and skills to respond thoroughly to multiple choice, short response and extended response questions

• Children will work independently as well as in partnerships to read and answer questions across various genres including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, folktales, fables, etc.

• Children will review main idea, theme, vocabulary, structure, author’s tone/purpose of the text

Unit 6: Poetry

Children will read a variety of poems with attention to mood, sounds, word choice and images. They will notice how these elements and the parts of a poem work together to create meaning.

• Children will study mentor poems to find poetic lines and think about how parts connect to an important idea

• Children will learn to challenge themselves to look at poems more deeply by notice images and meaning

• Children will connect with specific poems, share and carry them with them throughout their lives and become reflective about the world around them

Unit 7: Step Up to Fourth Grade

Children will brush up on all reading skills and strategies and set goals for summer reading to be on target for fourth grade.

• Children will gather in differentiated small groups to work on specific strategies to meet their needs as a growing reader

• Children will reflect on their reading progress and create goals for summer work to enhance their reading skills

Unit 1: Crafting True Stories

Children will write personal narratives using the complete writing process, including drafts and revision.

• Children will write stories with independence by gathering ideas, using a storyteller's voice, and editing as they write

• Children will become a storyteller on the page by writing leads, drafts, and paragraphs to support sequencing, dialogue, and elaboration

• Children will revise and edit their work by following the checklist to include using commas, quotation marks, and revising their ending

Unit 2: Changing the World: Persuasive Speeches, Petitions, and Editorials

Children will write to persuade people about causes they believe in using evidence, crafting techniques and paying attention to their audience.

• Children will state their opinions to persuade a particular audience and set goals as a writer

• Children will raise their level of persuasive writing by organizing, categorizing, and paying attention to word choice to evoke emotion

• Children will write letters to get their audience to care about their cause

Unit 3: The Art of Informational Writing

In this unit, children will write chapter books about topics on which they are experts by using a variety of structures and sub topics.

• Children will study mentor texts to gather ideas on how to organize their information. so that it makes it easier for readers to learn.

• Children will research to check facts about their topic.

• Children will craft speeches, articles or brochures using informational writing skills.

Unit 4: Baby Literacy Essay

Children will write an essay that states a strong opinion about a text and support it clearly with evidence from a text.

• Children will learn to structure an essay by organizing their thinking and by using evidence from the story to support their opinion or thesis

• Children will raise the level of their essay writing by being more organized and specific and will begin to develop their own opinion, or thesis, by thinking, talking, and writing about a story

• Children will use everything they have learned about supporting an opinion with details from a story with evidence from any text

Unit 5: Target Teaching

Students will generate writing in response to various genres of texts.

• Children will break apart and analyze questions in order to address all parts of the prompt

• Children will use details from texts in order to support written response

• Children will write in such a way as to balance evidence with explanation of evidence

• Children will appropriately format and write essays

Unit 6: Poetry

Children will write poetry by using poetic tools to create writing with a particular mood, feeling, and purpose.

• Children will write poetry by gathering ideas that they want to turn into a poem

• Children will use poetic devices, (tools) to create a mood and purpose for their writing

• Children will publish and illustrate a final piece of poetry

Unit 7: Once Upon a Time: Adapting and Writing Fairy Tales

Students will use familiar fairy tales to explore techniques of writing scenes, using story structure to create tension and crafting figurative language to convey mood.

• Children will write in the footsteps of the classics by studying classic tales, paying attention to painting a picture with words, sentence variety and dialogue

• Children will use storytelling, planning and drafting to write their own adaptations of fairy tales

• Children will write an original fairy tale by applying all they’ve learned from the classics