First 9 Weeks

In the beginning, students will be introduced to the structures, routines, and habits of readers and writers workshops. Students will choose "just right" books, envision as they read, and retell or summarize information that maintains order. Then students will grow ideas about the text as they dive deep into interpreting characters. While learning about the characters in stories and books, the students will determine character traits, discuss character change, analyze how one part of a story is important to the whole story, and determine the theme. Finally, the focus will shift from character study to building interpretations. Students will connect ideas across a text and learn that there is more than one correct way to interpret literature.

Good Questions

• What kind of person is _____________? What text evidence helps you know this?

• How did _____________ change in the story (there may be more than one change)? How did this change contribute to the story and to the theme?

• Pick a part from the story that is significant and ask your child how this part of the story is important to the whole story. Make sure your child provides text evidence to support their reasoning.

• What is the theme (life lesson) that this story develops? Use details from the story to support your answer.

Second 9 Weeks

In this unit, readers will grow in knowledge as they pay attention to details, put parts of text together, and ask questions about texts. Students will dive into research projects that revolve around extreme weather and natural disasters. This unit will challenge students in nonfiction texts by focusing on main ideas and supporting details, analyzing a part of a text to the whole text, analyzing the crafts author's use, and comparing and contrasting two texts.

• Summarize what you just read.

• Pick a part from the story and ask your child why that section is important to the whole text.

• Find a part of the text where you noticed "author's craft". Explain the craft technique the author used to me and why the author may have used this technique in this book.

• Explain briefly to me what this text teaches you about _______________?

Third 9 Weeks

The focus of this unit is to move kids up the bands of text complexity while strengthening the skills of unit 1, primarily interpretation and inferring themes. To accomplish this, students will focus on deepening the study of character (as characters in the books they are reading become more complex), finding them in fiction texts, and comparing and contrasting across texts. Students will learn to write more about point of view, emphasis, and interpretation and to be aware of the craft moves that the authors use.

• What is the theme (or life lesson) that developed in the story? Use details from the story to support your answer.

• Compare and Contrast ___________(book) to ___________(book). (Think about the themes and how the characters in each story act/respond.)

• What kind of person is ___________? Use details from the story to support your answer.

• How did ___________ (character) change from the beginning to the end of the story and why?

Mid Third 9 Weeks to Beginning of the Fourth 9 weeks

We cover a unit and a half in the third nine weeks. The second unit dives into historical fiction novels where the students are in groups reading the same book with rich content for book club conversations. These books are worth reading interpretively and discussing deeply. Engaging nonfiction texts support the novels by illuminating the time and place in which the historical fiction stories are set. Students will develop an understanding that while their story follows a timeline and the narrative timeline intersects with a timeline in history. This collection channels students to read between fiction and nonfiction, helping them to develop their analytical skills as well as their historical understanding. This unit revisits and strengthens the student's ability to develop ideas, theme, infer, compare and contrast, and synthesize.

Good Questions (these questions are spiraled back into this unit to strengthen student's comprehension skills)

• What kind of person is _____________? What text evidence helps you know this?

• What is ___________________ perspective or point of view on ___________ or about _____________?

• Pick a part from the story that is significant and ask your child how this part of the story is important to the whole story. Make sure your child provides text evidence to support their reasoning.

• What is the theme (life lesson) that this story develops? Use details from the story to support your answer.

Mid to Late Fourth 9 Weeks

The focus of the later part of the last 9 weeks is on poetry and testing as a genre. In the Poetry Unit of Study, students will read and listen to poems from mentor poets to support them in ways to write their own, and they will draw upon details and the personal significance of ordinary objects, actions, and experiences to generate ideas for their poems. Students will use a variety of strategies to generate and collect ideas for their own poems and then draft poems in a variety of forms. The purpose of this unit is to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and problem‐solving strategies they need to effectively approach the specific demands and challenges they will encounter on standardized reading tests.

• Which "stanza's" rhyme?

• What literary language is used in the poem?

• What poetic device does the author of the poem use?

• Ask your child a question that makes him/her point out the stanza and/or the line.