The Units of Study in Reading series has been designed to provide teachers with a curriculum framework to lean on and to adapt, with embedded professional development to help deepen knowledge of beginning reading and of methods for teaching reading.
What makes the Units of Study particularly magical is the way that one day’s teaching links to the next. Skills and concepts introduced in one unit are revisited and strengthened, both within a grade level and across grade levels.
Grade K Unit Titles
We Are Readers (Unit 1) Getting kids excited about reading and help them feel comfortable in the classroom. Students will work to develop essential pre-reading skills, and they’ll practice these skills both on their own and with their peers
Shared Reading (Unit 2) Channeling students to pay attention to the words in books. Students will learn to read text from left to right, one word after another, with one-to-one correspondence. They’ll also draw on their growing knowledge of high-frequency words and of the alphabetic code to read familiar patterned books.
Super Powers: Reading with Phonics and Sight Word Power (Unit 3) Rallying kids to do the hard work of decoding. They will learn to use new superpowers: “slider power”—the ability to slide through the sounds of words and blend them back together, “think power” to notice and wonder about the content of what they are reading, and “fix-it power,” which helps kids look closely at a challenging word and check to make sure it makes sense.
Boosting Reading Power (Unit 4) Students will continue to build on the superpowers they attained in the first three units. You’ll help give these powers a “turbo boost” to help young readers tackle texts with greater complexity.
Becoming Avid Readers (Unit 5) Students build upon and celebrate the journey they have taken since the start of the year. Students will leave kindergarten with a love of reading that is strong enough to propel them to carry books on picnics and visits to grandparents through the summer months and straight into the start of first grade.
About the Series
Lucy Calkins and the coauthors worked diligently to incorporate all their latest thinking and learning into the new units including:
research on the science of reading;
new comprehension research;
language research, including support for foundational skills such as grammar;
new research on writing, including writing from sources;
and research on knowledge generation.
The Units of Study address the full range of domains emphasized by the reading research community to provide a truly research-based approach that brings the best of what we know into classrooms in ways that will spark joy and provide teachers with the tools they need to teach responsively. The new Units of Study will do more to empower, revitalize, and strengthen teachers than ever before—and that will build even stronger communities of learning to set all kids on trajectories of growth.
For more information about the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, visit UnitsofStudy.com/K-2Reading.