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.
About the new Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Grade 1
The Units of Study in Reading for Grade 1 are designed to help your students continue to build on all of the skills they learned throughout Foundation, and to help them develop good reading habits they'll carry with them through the rest of their academic careers and beyond.
In Unit 1, Building Good Reading Habits, it will be your job to get students excited about reading and to model the habits of good readers. Students will continue to develop their decoding skills and will be able to monitor for sense and self-correct with increased accuracy. Unit 2, Word Detectives, begins with the discovery of a top-secret, mysterious envelope from the Super-Secret Detective Agency, inviting your class to take on the role of word detectives. They'll continue to build vocabulary, building up a bank of snap words, and they'll practise monitoring for comprehension. Across Unit 3, Learning about the World, you'll balance your teaching between decoding work and the nonfiction reading skills that will be important in helping children learn from books. Unit 4, Readers Have Big Jobs to Do, marks an important juncture in the reading lives of many of your students as they make the shift from a reading diet of decodable books and carefully selected levelled texts to one of less-controlled trade books. Finally, in Unit 5, Meeting Characters and Learning Lessons, you'll teach some essential comprehension strategies, lifting the level of readers' work from earlier units. By the end of Grade 1, your students will have the foundational strategies they need to be successful readers in second grade and beyond.
Unit Titles
- Building Good Reading Habits (Unit 1)
- Word Detectives (Unit 2)
- Learning about the World (Unit 3)
- Readers Have Big Jobs to Do (Unit 4)
- Becoming Avid Readers (Unit 5)
About the Series
The new primary Units of Study in Reading and Writing represent wholesale changes. The best of all that was offered in the previous editions has been streamlined, clarified, and kept, but the new units are new indeed. 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
- research on knowledge generation.
The Units of Study address the full range of domains emphasised 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, revitalise, and strengthen teachers than ever before—and that will build even stronger communities of learning to set all kids on trajectories of growth.
