Units of Study in Reading Grade 2 Core Set (3rd Edition)

The Units of Study in Reading for Grade 2 are built to remind students of all the incredible skills they learned in Grade 1 and to transition them into the big kid work of being a second grader. 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 third grade and beyond.

The new Units of Study in Reading 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 her coauthors worked diligently to incorporate all their latest thinking and learning into the new units. This has included much new learning from working shoulder to shoulder with teachers in hundreds of classrooms in the years since the previous editions were published. It also includes all the authors have gleaned from “science of reading” research, new comprehension research, language research, research on knowledge generation, and more—all the research that many aptly term “the sciences of reading.” Taken together, all of this new learning has yielded new Units of Study that 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.