Unit 1: Up The Ladder Reading: Fiction

This first unit of study focuses on strengthening foundational skills and serves to set the stage for the work students will be doing throughout the year. Students will tackle the important work of building their reading identities; bringing stories to life as they learn to closely attend to their reading habits and ways in which the story is unfolding. The ultimate goal is to support students’ love for reading.

Children will:

• reflect upon their own reading identities and the strategies they utilize to find books that are most appropriate and appealing to them as a reader

• learn effective techniques for working in partnership as a means to lift their own and their peer’s reading skills

• learn how to apply envisioning and prediction strategies to bring stories to life.

• build fluency skills as they reread and act out scenes from texts

• employ strategies for tracking characters throughout a text

• to use what they know about themselves as a reader to establish personal goals and a plan for achieving them

Unit 2: Up the Ladder: Nonfiction

The primary goal of this unit is to help students become more engaged readers of informational texts by learning strategies to notice, question and wonder about the topic they are studying. Students will also explore ways readers respond to the information they are reading about.

Children will:

• consider what topics they like to read about by taking stock of what fascinates them, what are they curious about and what topics are most important to them

• learn to generate questions and use sentence stems to show enthusiasm

(“I never knew…” “Wow!....”)

• explore topics, pausing to ask and answer questions and notice what information is familiar to them and what new information are they learning

• learn to gather details and begin to identify main or central ideas

• build reading volume as they are reading multiple texts to strengthen their reading muscles

• learn to pause and summarize their learning as they are reading through a text and to begin to notice bigger ideas that are communicated within a text

Unit 3: Reading the Weather, Reading the World

This is a nonfiction reading unit in which children will learn to grow ideas about weather and natural disasters. Children will use keywords (vocabulary) related to a topic, connect information across books, and articles within a topic.

Children will:

• make a commitment to learning by making connections between what they already know

• notice structures in a text to help them determine information that is most important

• learn how to look in and around new vocabulary words to figure out their meaning

• tackle complex passages by reading, rereading, and writing to explain their ideas

Unit 4: Interpreting Characters

This unit challenges children to read a text with deep engagement and intensity. Children will read to grow ideas about their characters.

Children will:

• use inquiry to explore how readers create procedures and systems to find books they want to read

• pay attention to details that reveal characters ́ obstacles and their struggles to overcome them

• learn how to debate differing viewpoints and support their side with evidence to persuade the other person

• push themselves to have deeper thoughts and build interpretations about a story by finding patterns and making connections

Unit 5: Target Teaching

In this unit, students will reflect and bring forward all they have learned within 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

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

• review main idea, theme, vocabulary, structure, compare/contrast, and author’s tone/purpose

Unit 6: Historical Fiction Clubs

This unit is a historical fiction unit. In this unit, children will work in book clubs to learn about a time and place in history.

Children will:

• pay attention at the start of a book to analyze the setting-when the story takes place, where, and what the place feels like

• keep track of story elements as they read, and continue to build their understanding of what’s going on

• recognize when a passage is significant and will think about how that passage connects to other parts of the text

• develop an interpretation of a book and will continue to grow and shape that interpretation as they read on

• organize their notes to gather and sort their facts

• look for similar themes across different books and articles to deepen their understanding

Unit 1: Up the Ladder: Narratives

This first writing unit is designed to establish foundational skills for all of the writing the students will do throughout the school year. The students will explore writing structures, learn tips for generating ideas and strategies to bring stories to life using elaboration techniques. Students will learn how to use their writers notebooks as a tool for organizing their idea, taking notes and drafting stories.

Children will:

• explore the problem/solution story structure

• explore strategies for generating ideas for stories and then determine which ideas they have the most to say about

• apply strategies for elaboration such as, showing a characters feelings, movements or passing of time

• try out different types of transitional phrases

• expand upon their knowledge of and use of revision strategies.

• learn to become reflective writers, noticing the techniques they use the most and establish goals to try new ones

Unit 2: Up the Ladder Information

This is a unit designed to give writers the skills, tools, and power to tackle the goals of grade level writing.

Children will:

• move repeatedly through the writing process while rapidly accelerating their progress as writers

• use the rapid cycle of generate/draft, and then revise

• build their stamina for revision and extend the amount of time they spend working productively on one piece

• feel accomplished and confident as writers, and that their writing skills are strengthened

Unit 3: Boxes and Bullets

This is a nonfiction writing unit. Children will develop a sense for what it feels like to write a whole essay. Children will use a boxes and bullets framework to organize their writing.

Children will:

• use an essay frame to help structure their writing

• support their thesis by developing different types of reasons

• gather a variety of evidence to support their opinions as they write within the framework of an essay

• use mini-stories to support their ideas

• experiment with different ways to start and end essays

• try out multiple leads and conclusions before deciding which works best for their essays

• self-assess their writing, using an Opinion Writing Checklist

Unit 4: The Literary Essay

Children will learn to write structured, compelling essays in which they make and support claims and incorporate evidence.

Children will:

• study characters with an attentiveness to detail and develop those ideas

• use simple prompts to elaborate on their ideas

• use direct quotes to support their claims about a text

• think carefully about their introductions and conclusions

• find evidence to support their claims

• edit their writing to make sure their punctuation and tenses are correct

Unit 5: Target Teaching

In this unit, 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

• use details from paired texts in order to support written response

• use text evidence to balance their writing

• appropriately format and write compare and contrast essays

Unit 6: Historical Fiction

In this writing unit of study, students will continue to hone their research skills and apply what they have learned in previous reading and writing units. They will work to synthesize their research to craft an overview of their topic and then develop a series of chapters related to a specific sub-topic of their research.

Children will:

• synthesize their research from across texts

• apply note-taking strategies to organize their research

• develop focused chapters on a subtopic of interest

• apply previously taught text structures for communicating information to the reader (consider what they want to teach their reader and how to best accomplish this goal)

• write from a specific perspective or take a position on the topic to share with their reader