About the new Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grade K
The Units of Study in Writing for Kindergarten are designed to help you introduce your students to the writing workshop, and to welcome them into the world of school. Your most important goal in Unit 1, Launching the Writing Workshop, is to help your children see themselves as writers, and to realize that their ideas, interests, and lives are worth writing about. In Unit 2, Show and Tell Writing, children will learn to make texts that are a written version of show-and-tell time. This unit harnesses the natural power of show and tell to motivate students to write words that come closer to conventional spelling, and to use high-frequency words to write longer labels and sentences. Unit 3, Writing for Readers: Writing Readable True Stories, will ask students to begin writing true stories and personal narratives in which they honor their families, neighborhoods, daily lives, culture, and traditions. The goal is to move kids firmly into more conventional writing, to help them write readable texts, in sentences that they and others can reread while pointing under the words, matching each written word to a spoken word. Finally, in Unit 4, Persuasive Writing of All Kinds: Using Words to Make a Change, you’ll show students that writing involves real purposes and real audiences: making letters to be mailed, songs to be sung, chants to be performed, speeches to be made, petitions to be circulated, signs to be displayed. By the end of this writing workshop, your students will have all the skills necessary to continue writing throughout the summer, into first grade and beyond.
Unit Titles
- Launching the Writing Workshop (Unit 1)
- Show and Tell Writing (Unit 2)
- Writing for Readers: Writing Readable True Stories (Unit 3)
- Persuasive Writing of All Kinds: Using Words to Make a Change (Unit 4)
About the Series
The new Units of Study in Writing represent wholesale changes. The best of all that was offered in the previous editions has been streamlined, clarified, and kept, but the new units are new indeed. Lucy Calkins and her coauthors worked diligently to incorporate all their latest thinking and learning into the new units. This has included much new learning from working shoulder to shoulder with teachers in hundreds of classrooms in the years since the previous editions were published. It also includes all the authors have gleaned from “science of reading” research, new comprehension research, language research, research on knowledge generation, and more—all the research that many aptly term “the sciences of reading.” Taken together, all of this new learning has yielded new Units of Study that will do more to empower, revitalize, and strengthen teachers than ever before—and that will build even stronger communities of learning to set all kids on trajectories of growth.
For more information about the Units of Study for Teaching Writing, visit UnitsofStudy.com/K-2Writing.
