Up the Ladder Reading: Fiction is for upper-grade readers—and teachers—who are new to the norms and culture of reading workshop, and for readers who would benefit from foundational instruction in reading fiction. By instilling strong habits and routines, this start-of-the-year unit will prepare students to take charge of their own reading lives.
The unit:
- establishes the critical structure of read-aloud, utilising authentic texts woven into the minilessons to model the essential skills of fluency, envisioning, prediction, and making deeper inferences;
- invites readers to develop literary discourse and engage in shared interpretation through reading partnerships;
- teaches students to recognise and select appropriately levelled, just-right books with agency and independence;
- moves readers quickly up levels of text complexity, utilising running records and performance assessments to gauge students’ fluency and ability to do higher-level comprehension work;
- builds capacity for writing about reading through flagging, jotting ideas, and developing reading notebooks as places to record and grow thinking around books;
- includes suggestions for adapting the unit for middle school with alternate mentor texts.
Students will come away from this unit as reinvigorated, changed readers—seeing themselves, their books, and their world differently.
