Curriculum Connection
K-5 ELA- March 2023
Kindergarten ELA
Reading Unit 5: Readers are Resourceful:Tackling Hard Words and Tricky Parts in Books
***NOTE*** This unit has been updated to align with the science of reading.
This unit builds on students' newfound 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: Continued
Reading Unit 6: Reading Across Genres
In this unit, readers will read all kinds of books, from different genres, on the same topic. They will work on gathering information on a topic from the words and pictures. Students will be reminded to ask and answer questions about key details that they may encounter throughout texts.
Writing Unit 5: From Scenes to Series
In this unit, students will learn the process of creating a pretend character. Students will learn that fiction writers call on their pretending skills to invent characters and small moment adventures, and then students will come up with characters of their own, naming them and putting them into imagined scenes.
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)
3rd Grade ELA
New! Reading Unit 4: Research Clubs, Elephants, Penguins, and Frogs Oh My!
Overview of Unit:
This unit reinforces nonfiction reading skills while students form clubs, each club will study a topic of choice. Students form clubs, and each club studies its own animal in Bend 1, another animal in Bend 2, then compares and contrasts those animals in Bend 3, and finally researches a more overarching concept like adaptation or survival, noting how the concept applies to the two animals they have studied in their clubs and to the other animals they have also learned about. This unit ends with children applying what they have learned about animals to a real-world project such as the challenge to design a better zoo.
Topic 1 (Bend 1)
You’ll teach children to gather texts that relate to a subtopic and to read the most basic of them and to preview all the texts to glean an overview of the subtopics contained within the topic. You’ll make a point of articulating the transferable idea: as researchers orient themselves to text, they draw on prior knowledge of the structure of the topic.
Topic 2 (Bend 2)
This bend will invite students to start the process again, this time drawing on what they learned. It reminds students that the skills they learned earlier in the unit can be applied to all the research they do know and for the rest of their lives.
Topic 3 (Bend 3)
Each club will study an overarching concept like adaptation, life cycles, habitats, land forms , noting how that concept applies to the topics they have studied in their clubs —synthesizing , comparing, and contrasting. The unit ends with students applying their knowledge of a real world problem: investigating, planning, and presenting ideas.
Writing Unit 4: Once Upon a Time
Overview of Unit:
In this unit, teachers will once again work with children to help them become better fiction writers. Over the course of this 3 topic unit, students will write two fairy tale adaptations and one original fairy tale. This unit will push students to use a strong storyteller’s voice, write with a story arc, create the world of a story, and bring characters to life. Teachers will emphasize the importance of clear event sequence, and language that signals event order.
Students will also be pushed toward 4th grade standards by helping them name some of the ways authors use words with alliteration and sensory language to create effects. Through the multiple writing cycles of this unit, students will have ample time to practice these writing lessons.
In Topic 1 (Bend One) of the unit, students will choose to adapt either “Little Red Riding Hood” or “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”. At the start of the unit, children will take time to study the storyline and qualities of fairy tale writing. They will plan their adaptations, thinking about which parts of the original tale they’ll adapt.
In Topic 2 (Bend Two), students will write their second adaptation. This time choosing from any fairy tale they wish. The theme of this bend is independence and transference. Children will use the anchor charts from the first bend to help them make writing plans for what they plan on trying in their second adaptation.
In Topic 3 (Bend Three), you will teach students to write original fairy tales, applying all they’ve learned from the first two topics. This topic is fast-paced and rigorous. You will begin by teaching students to draw from the qualities of good stories--a character with traits and wants who encounters trouble, and then the trouble gets resolved.
4th Grade ELA
Reading Unit 4: Historical Fiction Book Clubs
Overview of Unit:
The unit is appropriately complex for fourth graders who have engaged in a year of character analysis, determining themes, inferring within a text, comparing and contrasting texts, synthesizing across texts, and talking/writing about reading. The goal of this unit is for students to emerge from the unit as knowledgeable readers who can build complex interpretations, who know how to listen closely to learn from others, and who carry ideas across book club discussions and across more than one text.
Topic 1 (Bend 1)
This bend teaches readers to read complex texts with strong literal comprehension, monitoring for sense, actively working to fit the pieces together, and working with support forma book club to keep track of multiple plotlines, many characters and shifts in time and place. They will work to ask questions about their books to increase understanding of the text.
Topic 2 (Bend 2)
This bend focuses on interpretation and the idea that novels are not just about what is happening and the plot, but ideas. Our goal is that students will learn to articulate significant ideas about their books, to revise those ideas on their own, and to reconsider and elaborate those ideas in the company of other readers. You will also help them understand more about symbolism, minor characters, and subplots.
Topic 3 (Bend 3)
In this bend, readers will deepen their understanding of their book club books by turning to nonfiction images and texts. By studying nonfiction primary sources based on the time period they are reading about, readers will deepen their engagement with the time period, building knowledge and adding to the details they have learned to recognize as historical to that era. They also notice new information and perspectives. They will take that knowledge and apply it to their novels, looking for the places where nonfiction intersects or adds to what they are reading about. This work will help them develop interpretations about their book club books, building on their previous work with interpretations. This should lead to the readers leaving us with lasting lessons and deeper empathy.
Writing Unit 4: Literary Essay
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 the 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.
Topic 1 (Bend I): Writing about Reading.
This topic asks students to focus on arguing for ideas about characters, while carrying
forward what they have been taught about planning and drafting during the boxes-and-bullets essay.
Topic 2 (Bend II): Raising the Quality of Literary Essays.
In this topic students are taught that they have the power of higher levels of interpretative reading. Students work to dig deeper into their understanding of text and interpretation.
Topic 3 (Bend III): Writing Compare and Contrast Essays.
This topic shows students how to write compare and contrast essays, noting the different texts’ approaches to the same theme or issue.
5th Grade ELA
Reading Unit 4: Fantasy Book Clubs
Overview of Unit:
In this unit, students will work in clubs to become deeply immersed in the fantasy genre and further develop higher level thinking skills to study how authors develop characters and themes over time. Students read analytically as they consider how authors begin a book by establishing the setting as both a physical and a psychological place. You’ll lead students to think metaphorically as well as analytically, teaching them to explore the quests and themes within and across their novels. You’ll also help students engage more deeply by considering the implications of conflicts, themes, and lessons learned. Later in the unit, you’ll focus students on dealing with the challenges that harder novels pose. Kids will work on their habits as readers—going outside the book to build knowledge, or studying how authors introduce hard words and using strategies to learn new vocabulary as they read. In addition, readers investigate fantasy as a literary tradition and study how the thinking developed through reading fantasy novels will apply to other genres.
New! Writing Unit 4: Shaping Texts: From Essay and Narrative to Memoir
Overview:
In this unit students are offered the chance to write about connections between texts and themselves, and try their hand at writing essays interpreting characters. The unit asks students to discern meaning, convey events and experiences precisely, and logically link opinions and evidence. The unit brings together the learning from personal essays to the art of a memoir. The emphasis of the first part of the unit is to help students to write lots, to work productively and cycle through the writing process with independence and a sense of repertoire. Then time will be spent helping children meld the learning they have done with narrative and opinion writing. The unit will focus on getting students to write long and strong by providing them a choice of topics—topics that they know a lot about and are passionate about— knowledge from their lived experience.
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