When Lucy and her coauthors worked on the Units of Study, they had to make a choice whether to “make shoes that fit—or shoes to grow into.” They chose the latter, writing that curriculum for kids who are growing up within Units of Study workshops. This means that each unit assumes students have experienced the unit that came before it. But that, of course, won’t be the case for upper-grade students entering reading workshops for the first time.
The Up the Ladder Reading units:
-
begin with the clear expectation that students are in charge of their own reading lives;
-
stress agency and independence across sessions;
-
teach students to recognize and select a just-right book, to notice and flag parts of the text while reading, and to engage in conversations around the texts they are reading;
-
help students build essential skills such as fluency, envisioning, prediction, making deeper inferences, and finding main ideas.
The TCRWP staff spent a long time studying how to successfully accelerate children’s growth in reading and writing. They analyzed the progression of skills taught across elementary and middle-school grades, identified the most critical foundational skills, and then devised the Up the Ladder units to give students a clear pathway to support the development of these key skills.
For more information about the Up the Ladder units, visit UnitsofStudy.com/UptheLadder.
