The Units of Study in Writing series is designed to support students’ abilities to be strategic, metacognitive writers. Within and across grades, the units fit tongue-and-groove alongside each other. Together, they help students consolidate and use what they have learned to meet and exceed world-class standards for each grade.
What makes the Units of Study particularly magical is the way that one day’s teaching links to the next. Skills and concepts introduced in one unit are revisited and strengthened, both within a grade level and across grade levels. The Learning Progressions that undergird the Units of Study in Writing are cohesively organized to help teachers see ways to teach toward big goals, offering a clear map of what writing development looks like, grade by grade and level by level.
About the new Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grade 1
In The Units of Study in Writing, Grade 1, students learn how to make their opinion writing even more convincing by using a variety of reasons to support their opinions. They’ll practice noticing tiny details to come up with a list of reasons to support their opinions. There will also be freestanding out-of-the-box units that can beinserted into your curricular sequence. The combined sequence of units will comprise the heart and soul of your writing curriculum while also setting children up to do rigorous work that addresses most state standards’ expectations of them as first-grade writers.
In Unit 1, Small Moments, children learn to write stories, and to write bit by bit, including details. But the unit also teaches youngsters to participate in a first-grade writing workshop as they learn the habits, conventions, and mindsets of a workshop classroom. Unit 2, Topic Books, gets students writing informational or “topic” books, laying the foundation for all of the information writing that students will do in the future. First-graders will learn to appreciate the power and purposes of opinion writing in Unit 3, Writing Reviews, as they explore how people sort, rank, categorize, explain, convince, persuade, argue, give in, change, and ultimately are changed. The focus of Unit 4, From Scenes to Series: Writing Fiction, is realistic fiction. This unit has been carefully designed to make sure students draw on everything they have learned about narrative writing while simultaneously learning essentials about writing fictional narratives.
Grade 1 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 primary Units of Study in Reading and 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 the coauthors worked diligently to incorporate all their latest thinking and learning into the new units including:
- research on the science of reading;
- new comprehension research;
- language research, including support for foundational skills such as grammar;
- new research on writing, including writing from sources;
- and research on knowledge generation.
The Units of Study address the full range of domains emphasized by the reading research community to provide a truly research-based approach that brings the best of what we know into classrooms in ways that will spark joy and provide teachers with the tools they need to teach responsively. The new Units of Study 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.
