Building on the teaching and instructional features in Units of Study for Primary Writing, Lucy Calkins and her colleagues from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project extend their writing curriculum to the upper-elementary grades with Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5. Offering a whole new set of units, this series places and added emphasis on mechanics, assessment, and collaborating with colleagues.
Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5 is organized around 6 Units of Study. Each Unit of Study lays out four to six weeks of instruction. Together the units provide the teaching points, minilessons, strategies, and tools you'll need to jump in and teach writing to your students. Presented sequentially, these units help you teach narrative and expository writing with increasing sophistication.
1. Launching the Writing Workshop
This unit jumpstarts your year by reviewing and teaching the essentials of writing—collecting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. In addition to introducing practical strategies for finding topics and generating writing, this unit also helps you foster a community of writers in your classroom and teach students how to work with partners constructively .
2. Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing
In this unit students learn how to use emblematic details, images, dialogue, and carefully-chosen words to make a small moment into a compelling story. While developing a personal narrative students learn to create suspense, align story elements into a cohesive whole, and use timelines to link internal thoughts with external plots.
3. Breathing Life Into Essays
This unit guides you in teaching students how to craft thesis-driven essays drawn from their own personal experiences and expertise. Throughout this unit students learn how to develop a thought, organize their thinking with boxes and bullets, and use writing conventions to strengthen their work.
4. Story Arcs: Writing Short Fiction
This unit helps you expand students' previous learning by helping them use story arcs to create rising action, a conflict, and a resolution. Students learn to use character development, symbolism, and their knowledge of the elements of a story to develop powerful, realistic fiction.
5. Writing About Literature
In this unit students draw on what they have learned about writing stories to read stories well. They use what they've learned about essays to help them craft essays that analyze and respond to literature.
6. Memoir: Putting It All Together
This introspective unit on memoir writing is designed to help students draw on all they have learned about the structure and craft of writing. From their experience writing essays, students learn to make points about their lives. From their understandings about personal narratives, students learn to write about memories that illustrate their points in compelling ways.
These 6 Units of Study are reinforced by two resources that offer everyday support.
A Guide to the Writing Workshop, Grades 3–5
This overview volume equips you to teach a productive, well-managed writing workshop, introduces you to the methods that underlie writing instruction, and helps you plan a yearlong writing curriculum.
Resources for Teaching Writing, Grades 3–5
This CD-ROM supports your writing program with samples of student writing, video clips of the authors teaching, and a range of printable reproducibles organized unit-by-unit.
In total Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5 contains 7 books and 1 CD-ROM.
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