Curriculum Connection
K-5 ELA- February 2021
Kindergarten ELA
Reading Unit 3: Reading For Information (Continued)
In the final bend of the Reading for Information unit, students will learn how to think and talk about books across a topic. Students will learn how to reread books and notice things that are in both book and things that are decidedly not in both books-similarities and differences.
Writing Unit 4: How To Books- Making a Series
In Topic 3 of this unit, students find opportunities across the school day to write how-to books that can be helpful to others. Students will realize that topics are really everywhere and that there are many opportunities over the course of a day for them to teach readers how-to do something. Children will also be encouraged to write a series or collections of how-to books.
Writing Unit 4: How To Books- Learning from a Mentor
1st Grade ELA
Reading Unit 4: Readers Get To Know Characters in Books (continued)
Unit 4: Nonfiction Chapter Books Topic 2
Students will progress toward writing chapter books, which of course gives them opportunities to work on structuring their texts. It is likely that the pace of student writing will slow down during this bend because the books they will be producing will become longer and more ambitious. Writers will revisit the mentor text Sharks once again to investigate how chapter books are written. They will also be introduced to many of the more common elements found in information books: how-to pages, stories, introductions, and conclusions.
Unit 4: Nonfiction Chapter Books- Topic 3
By the end of the unit, students will be writing chapter books with increasing speed and independence. Students will take what they have learned and set goals to write new (and better) chapter books. In addition, there will be opportunities for students to learn simple ways to research their topics by studying photographs and asking questions. Lessons around craft and thoughtful punctuation will add a flourish to the powerful writing first-graders are now doing in their informational books.
2nd Grade ELA
Reading Unit 5: Getting to Know Characters in Series (Continued)
Writing Unit 5: Opinion-Writing About Reading
Students will focus on raising the level of their letter writing. Teachers will coach students to engage in some close reading as a way to spark new ideas and to push themselves to deepen their thinking, using their post-it notes to elaborate on their opinion pieces. Before students send their letters into the world, they will also participate in a punctuation inquiry and then work to incorporate the conventions that they are noticing in published books into their own writing
Writing Unit 5: Opinion-Writing About Reading
3rd Grade ELA
(Continued) Reading Unit 5: Learning Through Reading: Countries Around the World (January-February)
In Topic 2 (Bend II), you will charge students to raise the level of their work to new heights as you let them know they will be studying another country of their choice. Students will take on the responsibility of how they will go about the work to study a different country by relying on the learning in Topic 1 and past resources.
Engaging Scenario (Option 1) Situation: You are going to be holding a World’s Fair where each student will come as your character ready to talk with passersby (teachers, parents, other classes) about your “life” and homeland.
Engaging Scenario (Option 2) Situation: You have just returned from an amazing trip to your selected country. As a contributing writer for the new travel blog: 3rd Grade Globetrotters, you have been asked to write a blog post giving the Top 10 Reasons to Visit _(country)_
The last week or so of February will start Unit 6: Biography Book Clubs:
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.
(Continued) Writing Unit 3: Changing the World (January-February)
In Topic 1 (Bend I), you will rally your third-graders to gather and support bold and brave opinions as they write persuasive speeches. Children will learn that persuasive writers look at their world and imagine how it could be better to grow ideas for possible writing projects. They’ll first work together on a shared topic and then write many more speeches in their notebooks. Allowing the class time to write and revise together through shared writing is a wonderful way to rally students around the idea of writing to make change.
Board Approved: June 7, 2018 36 | P a g e
In Topic 2 (Bend II), writers are given the opportunity to work for an extended amount of time on one piece, taking it through the writing process. They will gather facts and details and work to organize these. Students will “write long” about their topics, categorize the evidence they collect, and decide which evidence belongs in their speeches.
In Topic 3 (Bend III), students will transfer and apply everything they have learned about writing persuasive speeches to writing other types of opinion pieces--petitions, editorials, persuasive letters, and so on. After noticing that much of the work they’ve completed on speeches also applies to these other types of writing, you’ll charge them to produce work in any of these genres.
If time allows….In Topic 4 (Bend IV), “Cause Groups”, students will work in collaborative groups to support causes. You may have one group dedicated to recycling, for example, and another group dedicated to animal rights. Groups will decide on projects they need to create to get others to act for their cause. They may create speeches, petitions, or editorials, and they may assign different members of a small group to write on a different project. (This bend appears in Lucy Calkins’ “Changing the World” opinion unit, but has not been outlined in this curriculum due to time constraints.)
In the last week of February, the Art of Revision will start.
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.
4th Grade ELA
Reading and Writing GEM Units
NEW! Bringing History to Life (February-March)
Aligning Grade 4 History Reading and Writing Units: A User's Guide
This guide is helpful when learning helpful hints to teach these units together.
This unit is meant to go hand in hand with Reading Unit 5 “Reading History”. In both of these units you will choose whether or not to focus on the American Revolution, Westward Expansion, or if you will let students choose a historical time period to investigate.
The Lucy Calkins 4th grade writing spiral Bringing History to Life uses the American Revolution as the historical time period students learn about as they learn to read history. This choice matches with the Missouri Learning Standards shift of the American Revolution from 5th grade to 4th grade. With the new Missouri Learning Standards, the American Revolution is only taught in 4th grade. Park Hill will be adopting our new social studies curriculum that uses these standards in 2018-2019 (piloting being done in 2017-2018). We know in the past many 4th grade teachers have opted to focus this unit and the Bringing History to Life writing unit around Westward Expansion. That is certainly still an option. You will need to choose which passages and resources you will use from your Westward Expansion mentor texts for each lesson. We also know that some 4th grade teachers chose to allow each student to choose their own period in history to research and for many students this was the time period they read about in their historical fiction book club. The historical fiction unit now follows this unit, so teachers will need to consider this change in deciding whether or not to allow students to choose any time period.
NEW! Reading History: February-March
Overview of Unit:
This is a unit on researching history. As the second of the two nonfiction reading units for fourth grade, a focus will be on moving the fourth-graders along the continuum of skill development in reading nonfiction. This unit builds on the work of the first fourth-grade nonfiction study in Unit 3 and guides students to learn to read like historians. This unit is also timed to go along with the Bringing History to Life writing unit (Unit 5). You should start this reading unit about a week before you start the writing unit for the reading to support the writing.
The Lucy Calkins 4th grade spiral Reading History uses the American Revolution as the historical time period students learn about as they learn to read history. This choice matches with the Missouri Learning Standards shift of the American Revolution from 5th grade to 4th grade. With the new Missouri Learning Standards, the American Revolution is only taught in 4th grade. We know that some 4th grade teachers chose to allow each student to choose their own period in history to research and for many students this was the time period they read about in their historical fiction book club. The historical fiction unit now follows this unit, so teachers will need to consider this change in deciding whether or not to allow students to choose any time period.
In Topic 1 (Bend I) students work in research teams to investigate the events leading up to the American Revolution or another event in history of their choosing. You will show students how researchers pay attention to text structures in order to organize their notes and their thinking. You will show students how researchers eventually narrow their focus, synthesizing new information into what they already know, and paying attention to the people, the location, and the sequence of the event they are studying. You will also introduce students to primary sources and show them strategies for using these more difficult texts. At the end of the bend students will celebrate their work by sharing what they have learned with each other.
5th Grade ELA
(Continued) Writing Unit 5: The Research-Based Argument Essay (Mid January- March)
Topic 1 (Bend 1): Establishing and Supporting Positions
In this bend students will be exploring the issue of whether chocolate milk should be served in schools or not. To develop a solid argument, you will teach students how to research both sides of the issue rather than making a snap judgment based primarily on opinion. Students will study both print and digital texts to understand differing perspectives on this issue. They will then draft letters to the principal, based on evidence and data from sources that is both paraphrased and quoted.
Topic 2 (Bend 2): Building Powerful Arguments
In this bend students will then return to their research, thinking about how to turn them into essays. For this work, they will return to their research to think about possible note-taking systems that will work best for this process, while also looking at their research with a more critical eye. As they draft they will consider which evidence to use to bolster their claim, determine flaws in their own logic and revise to make sound arguments. They will also entertain counterclaims in their essay, keeping in mind the perspectives of the audience and finding the evidence that would best speak to them.
(Continued) Reading Unit 5: Argument and Advocacy: Researching Debatable Issues (mid January-March)
Topic 1: Launching into Investigating Issues
In Topic I of this unit you will rally students into work that is foundational to the unit-the work of analyzing arguments-with a one day argument intensive in which students read and analyze a variety of arguments. With this experience in mind, students will then work in research clubs, each club studying a debatable, current issue. (Should we ban or support zoos? Are extreme sports worth the risks?) To study the issue, students will read text sets included in the units which are designed to offer different perspectives on each issue. A resources to use with multiple articles is Calkins high interest nonfiction text sets found in Schoology. Students will read a variety of informational and argumentative texts, and then debate the issue, work which will push their cross-texts synthesis skills to new heights, as well as support their abilities to make their own arguments. Across the bend, they will continue to engage in debates, while you ramp up the level of their research, teaching them research is a cycle of reading and thinking in response to that thinking and showing them how to summarize arguments and think about how to respond with their own meaningful argument and claims.
Topic 2 Raising the Level of Research
In Topic 2, you will continue to push students to dig deeper into research. They will develop deeper questions and new ideas on their issue, and they will engage in more complicated conversations. You will teach them to read and reread more difficult texts with a critical eye, showing students that they can consider and compare perspective, craft, and strength of argument, in addition to information and ideas of the author as they read across texts on a topic. By the end of the bend, the debates you hear should be deeply informed and nuanced, showing students’ firm grasp of the complexity of the issues they have been studying.
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