About the new Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grade 2
The Units of Study in Writing for Grade 2 is designed to help your second graders take all of the writing skills in their possession to the next level, and to prepare them with the skills they’ll need to be successful in third grade and beyond. In Unit 1, Making Small Moments Big, you’ll draw on the first-grade notion that stories can be about small, every day, beautifully mundane moments—but now, you’ll offer a new angle. You’ll nudge students to consider not only times in their lives, but also the feelings they felt, to find moments that matter. Unit 2, Chapter Books: Writing Nonfiction from the Heart, will remind students that nonfiction can be more than just the rote listing of facts. They’ll learn that nonfiction is often steeped in the emotions of human experience. This unit emphasizes writing nonfiction from the heart, focusing on topics that matter deeply to your students. In Unit 3, Finding Awesome Everywhere: Celebrating through Opinion Writing, you’ll encourage students to write more thoughtfully about their lives, the things they love, and the books they read. If you know second-graders, you know that they have a lot to say, and you’ll harness that gift as you offer your students opportunities to share their opinions about the world and about books. The second-grade writing workshop concludes with Unit 4, Writing Research-Based Nonfiction, in which you’ll invite your kids to become researchers, learning through study and note-taking, through gathering facts and growing ideas about a topic. They’ll be asked to write numerous chapter books (sometimes on the same topic) using different organizing structures. By the end of this writing workshop, students will have the confidence and motivation necessary to continue writing creatively over the summer and into third grade.
Unit Titles
- Making Small Moments Big (Unit 1)
- Chapter Books: Writing Nonfiction from the Heart (Unit 2)
- Finding Awesome Everywhere: Celebrating through Opinion Writing (Unit 3)
- Writing Research-Based Nonfiction (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
