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 2
The Units of Study in Reading for Grade 2 are built to remind students of all the incredible skills they learned in first grade and to transition them into the big kid work of being in Grade 2.
In Unit 1, Becoming a Big Kid Reader, you'll teach your students how to read with greater fluency and help them develop strategies to become efficient and flexible word solvers as they encounter trickier words. Throughout Unit 2, Becoming Experts, you'll invite kids into the fascinating world of nonfiction reading, ushering them into the unit by suggesting that good readers of nonfiction are interested in everything. They'll learn to read closely, with wide-awake attention to detail. At the start of Unit 3, Tackling Longer Words and Longer Books, you'll ask for your students' help in refurbishing your classroom library. Throughout this process, students will begin to work through more difficult words and will practise scooping up longer phrases. In Unit 4, Growing Knowledge Together, you'll amplify the importance of reading partnerships, helping your students talk and collaborate in new and more rigorous ways. Finally, in Unit 5, Stepping into the World of the Story, you'll invite students to think about the incredible power that reading has to take us on adventures, on field trips, to faraway places, and to familiar neighbourhoods. Students will work independently and with reading groups to make sense of more challenging texts. By the end of Grade 2, students will have the solid foundation necessary to move into Grade 3 and beyond.
Unit Titles
- Becoming a Big Kid Reader (Unit 1)
- Becoming Experts (Unit 2)
- Tackling Longer Words and Longer Books (Unit 3)
- Growing Knowledge Together (Unit 4)
- Stepping into the World of the Story (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.
