Our primary reading curriculum is Lucy Calkins' Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) Units of Study in Reading. Each day, I will provide students with a minilesson on a reading skill or strategy and students will apply the strategy to their independent “just right” books. While students read and jot down their thinking, I will work with small groups and individuals. Our planned units of study will be: 



About the Grade 5 Units

Fifth grade is a time for children to hone their intellectual independence. In the first unit, Fantasy Book Clubs students will be challenged to think metaphorically as well as analytically, exploring the quests and themes within their novels. Students will consider the implications of conflicts, themes, and lessons learned. In the second unit, Interpretation Book Clubs: Analyzing Themes, students draw on a repertoire of ways for reading closely, noticing how story elements interact, understanding how different authors develop the same theme, and comparing and contrasting texts that develop a similar theme. In the third unit, Tackling Complexity: Moving Up Levels of Nonfiction, children investigate the ways nonfiction texts are becoming more complex, and they learn strategies to tackle these new challenges. This unit emphasizes the strong foundational skills, such as fluency, orienting to texts, and word solving, that are required to read complex nonfiction. In the fourth unit, Reading Like a Fan, students will closely examine two classic books centering around the theme of "survival" and will compare and contrast narrative elements, writer's craft, and thematic tendencies. In the fifth unit, Intellectual Independence: An Ambitious Workshop for Experienced Readers, students will further develop higher-level thinking skills to study how authors develop characters and themes over time. They will examine stories that have multiple narratives, tangled plotlines and cohorts of unpredictable characters.


Core Literature Novels

We will be reading several novels this year, including Holes, Wonder, Tuck Everlasting, Home of the Brave, and Sophia's War: A Tale of the Revolution.


Nonfiction Article Study

Each month we will be reading, considering and examining nonfiction articles in order to practice basic comprehension skills: finding main idea, summarizing, analyzing relationships, identifying vocabulary, understanding multiple perspectives, etc.  Also, this frequent practice will strengthen our ability to find evidence to prove a claim, which is a key reading standard in 5th grade.


5,000 Page Club

Students will be expected to read 5,000 pages from novels during the year, both assigned reading and choice reading.  They will have logs to record each book when they are finished reading it (an entire book recorded once / not a record of nightly pages). When a student reaches 5,000 pages, we will celebrate their achievement in class and I will allow them to pick a book from "Mrs. Figueira's Bookstore" collection as my treat.