About the new Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grade 1
The Units of Study in Writing for Grade 1 will help your students to build on all the important skills they learned in kindergarten, and to start writing in new genres and styles. In Unit 1, Small Moments, youngsters will learn to cup their hands around the small moments of their lives and to turn those small moments into sequential, detailed little stories. They’ll start to notice things like sound words and focus on using more precise language to get across meaning. Across Unit 2, Topic Books, you’ll get students started writing information books about their classroom, their own special place in the world. At the end of this unit, students will return to the same shelves and bins that originally sparked ideas for writing and add their own books to the library. In Unit 3, Writing Reviews, you’ll help your first graders appreciate the power and purposes of opinion writing. You’ll help them understand that, in this genre, people sort, rank, categorize, explain, convince, persuade, argue, give in, and ultimately change and are changed. Finally, in Unit 4, From Scenes to Series: Writing Fiction, you’ll bring your students into the magical world of pretend—where they create characters and imagine what happens to them. Students will start series writing. Yes, series! By the end of first grade, your students will be writing, editing, and revising their work with a greater sense of independence, ready to show off the unique, personal series of books they’ve created.
Unit Titles
- Small Moments (Unit 1)
- Topic Books (Unit 2)
- Writing Reviews (Unit 3)
- From Scenes to Series: Writing Fiction (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.
