Curriculum Connection
K-5 ELA- March
Kindergarten ELA
Reading Unit 5: Readers are Resourceful:Tackling Hard Words and Tricky Parts in Books
This unit builds on students' new found independence with reading. Students will be moving from rereading class shared reading and interactive writing texts to reading fresh, new books on their own. Students will need to carry forward applying reading strategies that they worked on in the previous units and begin reading more and more “just right” books independently. Students will learn more strategies for word solving, cross-checking, self-correcting, and meaning-making and you will model for them the resiliency of careful readers. Readers will learn to be flexible and to self-monitor as they read.
Writing Unit 5: All About Books
This unit teaches students that their beloved bicycle, their action figure collection, and their favorite topics - horses, insects, dinosaurs - are book worthy! During this unit, each child will write lots of information books about lots of different topics. Students will recognize that their own lives are full of so much that they can teach others.
Writing Unit 5: All About Books
Students will also learn how to elaborate and say more on each page by including more information, adding examples, and considering their readers’ questions. They will also use many of the same strategies that they already learned for writing how-to texts.
1st Grade ELA
Reading Unit 5: Readers Can Be Their Own Teachers, Working Hard to Figure Out Tricky Words and Parts in Books
Students will learn to use various strategies, not only to solve words correctly, but also to make corrections to confusing parts in order to make sense of the books that they read.
Reading Unit 5 (Continued)
As the unit ends, students will learn to use various strategies to improve their fluency while reading, reading smoothly with few errors.
Writing Unit 5: From Scenes to Series (continued)
As this unit continues, young writers will be set on a new path-to use all they have learned up until now to write series. Students will learn that series writers put their characters into more than one book, and more than one adventure, and they give special consideration to what to put into their very first book-Book One-of a series so that readers are set up for the books to follow. The class will have a mini-celebration of children’s first series. The focus will then shift to turning your children into more powerful writers of realistic fiction as they engage in a study of genre and of themselves as writers. Children will learn that writers call on their own experiences to imagine tiny details they can include in a story to let their readers know a story is realistic.
2nd Grade ELA
Reading Unit 6: Fairy Tales and Fables
Writing Unit 6: Poetry: Big Thoughts in Small Packages
During this unit, students will learn that poets are sparked by objects and feelings that they translate to music on a page. By paying special attention to sound, students will develop readers’ ears as they experiment with line breaks, as they come to understand that a poem is different than a story. A poem looks different from prose, and line breaks help a reader know when to pause.
Writing Unit 6: Poetry: Big Thoughts in Small Packages (continued)
As the unit progresses, children will recognize that in a poem, choice and placement of words matter more than ever. They will admire and experiment with metaphor, deepening their ability to see like poets. The focus will not be on forms such as haiku or diamante, but rather on meaning and crafting through repetition, metaphor, white space, and language.
3rd Grade ELA
New! Reading Unit 6: Biographies (February-March)
Overview of Unit: In this unit, students return to information reading, but information reading in a different structure: biography. In this narrative nonfiction unit, students will be reading biographies that teach about the past as well as the present, about one person and about how people can be in general. The goal of this unit is to teach students to use story grammar to determine importance, to synthesize, and to analyze across long stretches of text, ultimately growing theories within and across texts. Students will be doing all of this work in book clubs.
In Topic 1 (Bend I), children will be learning to draw on all they know about reading narratives and about character development to read biographies (and other forms of narrative nonfiction) well.
In Topic 2 (Bend II), students will be developing theories about the subject of a biography, thinking about what the person’s motivations and struggles are, as well as what resources the person draws on to overcome difficulties. Readers will also be thinking about how the characters’ achievements matter to the world at large.
If time allows…In Topic 3 (Bend III), readers will study different types of narrative nonfiction texts beyond biographies. They will be considering how they can apply what they know about reading narrative nonfiction to a broader array of texts including those in which a main character may be a plant, an animal, or a group of people.
New! Writing Unit 4: The Art of Revision (February-April)
Overview of Unit:
This unit will provide your children with a chance to take the time to step back and reflect on what they have done and then dive back into previous work with new vigor, making shapely and significant changes. You will encourage them to look over their entire collection of written work and think about how they can make work they wrote earlier even stronger. This sort of self-reflection increases students’ ownership over their own learning. You can tell students that the purpose of this project is for them to have a collection of finished work that represents their writing over the entire year, so for this unit you are going to focus on the narrative and expository pieces that have done so far.
In Topic 1 (Bend One) children are reminded that revision is a crucial stage of the writing process, that it separates “drafters” from real writers. Students will collect their best pieces of writing from work they have done so far--probably choosing previously published texts (and some entries) that feel worthy of revision--and they will place these in a special revision folder.
In Topic 2 (Bend Two), students will choose one piece of writing from the folder of “good enough to revise work,” and they’ll revise this one piece of writing in far deeper, more meaningful ways that is usual.
In Topic 3 (Bend Three), students will specifically revise one piece of narrative writing they produced earlier in the year, with an emphasis on the qualities of good narrative writing that they have learned.
In Topic 4 (Bend Four), students will specifically revise on piece of expository writing that they produced earlier in the year, with a special emphasis on structural clarity, paragraphing, sequencing, and following the thread of a unifying thesis statement (in the case of essays) or a heading/subheading (in the case of informational writing).
In Topic 5 (Bend Five), students will consolidate all of their revised pieces and edit these for final publication.
4th Grade ELA
(Continued) Writing Unit 5: Bringing History to Life (February-March)/ Unit 6: Literary Essay (March/April)
Topic 3 (Bend III): Building Ideas in Information Writing
Topic 3 takes this work to an entirely new level as students move from organizing information to developing their own ideas about the information.
Engaging Scenario: One way you can have a student demonstrate their understanding of their time period is to have students write on a note card or half page paper the date their event occurred, where it occurred, a picture and an explanation of why it is significant to history.
Unit 6: Literary Essay, begins in March as well.
Overview of Unit: In this unit, students will begin by developing and defending basic ideas about literature with a special emphasis on the challenges presented when one writes about a text, rather than life. Later students will be challenged to lift the level of their essays by lifting the level of their theses, writing about ideas that are more complex, nuanced, and interpretive, and supporting those ideas with various forms of textual evidence. Students will also learn to analyze author’s craft and use this in service of supporting their ideas. Finally, students will move from writing about one text to crafting compare and contrast essays about two pieces of literature.
(Continued) Unit 5: Reading History: February-March/ Unit 6: Historical Fiction Book Clubs (March-April)
In Topic 2 (Bend II) students will focus on perspective in this topic. Students will learn that any account of an event, whether in the present or the past, was written by a person who has his or her own perspective and one perspective is never the entire story.
In Topic 3 (Bend III) students will work in partnerships to start a new research project related to their earlier work. For instance, if they were researching events leading up to the American Revolution before, this work might focus on the time period after the Second Continental Congress.
Engaging Scenario
If students are using the research they did in this unit to inform their writing in the Bringing History to Life writing unit, consider combining this Engaging Scenario with the celebration you will have when the writers finish their books.
Unit 6: Historical Fiction Book Clubs begins in March as well.
Overview of Unit:
Historical fiction offers us the opportunity to be lifted out of our ordinary lives and imagine lives of great adventure and heroism. Historical fiction also creates an opportunity for you to teach your students to tackle complex texts through close reading in the company of friends. Historical fiction takes place in a time and place the reader has never experienced. The characters engage in experiences and social issues that help students to understand a time in our history more deeply. The goal for this unit is for students to emerge from this unit as knowledgeable readers who have new confidence in tackling complicated literature.
5th Grade ELA
New! Writing Unit 6: If Then (Cross genre based on needs) March
Overview:
Students come into writing at all different levels. This unit will allow the teacher to use their knowledge of students as writers to determine what lessons make the most sense for the writer’s in their room. Teachers will use students On Demand Pieces to select a unit and teach to meet the needs of their learners.
For this unit you will be using the If..Then..Curriculum book from your writing curriculum.
We are already teaching several of the units from the If...Then...book during the course of the year.
We currently teach:
● Information Writing: Feature Articles on Topics of Personal Expertise
● Journalism
● Fantasy
(Continued) Unit 5: Argument and Advocacy/ Reading Unit 6: Literary Craft Technique (March)
Topic 3 Studying a New Research Issue with More Agency and Independence
In Topic 3, you will rally students to study a new issue, reminding them to use all they have learned about research, reading information and argumentative texts, and using conversations as tools for understanding.
Engaging Scenario: Using the research your students have done over the last few weeks, students will be creating a digital Public Service Announcement, to advocate for or against a topic. In their PSA, students should list specific claims that support their ideas, and solutions to fix the argument at hand.
Unit 6: Literary Craft Techniques begins in March as well.
This unit is a chance for students to look closely at the author’s craft techniques and consider how these moves uncover the theme of the text. It is most important that students are noticing the craft moves and the impact they have on the story or poem rather than naming each type of move.
Jennifer Wiley
Email: wileyj@parkhill.k12.mo.us
Website: www.parkhill.k12.mo.us
Location: 7703 Northwest Barry Road, Kansas City, MO, USA
Phone: 816-359-6253
Twitter: @icjenwiley
Kim Fette
Email: fettek@parkhill.k12.mo.us
Website: parkhill.k12.mo.us
Location: 7703 Northwest Barry Road, Kansas City, MO, USA
Phone: 816-359-5750
Twitter: @kimElemCoach