About the Unit
Up the Ladder Reading: Nonfiction is for upper-grade readers—and teachers—who are new to the norms and culture of reading workshop, and for readers who would benefit from foundational instruction in the skills of reading nonfiction. By instilling strong habits and routines, this unit will support students in taking charge of their own reading lives and reading nonfiction with curiosity and engagement as they learn deeply about the world around them.
The unit:
- reinforces the critical structure of read-aloud, utilizing nonfiction texts woven into the minilessons to model the essential skills of determining main/central ideas, monitoring for meaning, and drawing on fiction reading skills when reading narrative nonfiction;
- invites readers to engage in shared understanding and idea-building through reading partnerships;
- teaches students to recognize and select appropriately levelled, just-right nonfiction books with agency and independence;
- supports readers in tackling higher levels of text complexity, utilizing running records and performance assessments to gauge students’ accuracy and ability to do higher-level comprehension work;
- builds capacity for writing about reading through flagging, jotting ideas, and pausing to reflect and grow thinking around books.
Students will come away from this unit as reinvigorated, changed readers—seeing themselves, their nonfiction books, and their world differently.
While these units are ideal for use with students in intermediate grades, specific guidelines are offered in the online resources to help teachers adapt instruction for middle school readers.
About the Series
How do you support upper-grade and middle school readers if they are new to the norms and culture of reading workshop, particularly if they may also have missed some foundational instruction in reading fiction and nonfiction? How do you do this in a way that builds a strong reading community and strong habits and routines? How do you approach all this if you are new to the teaching of reading workshop? The Up the Ladder Reading units offer a very good place to start.
The Up the Ladder Reading units aim to rub off summer rust, to get readers back into the swing of reading, and begin right away to move readers up levels of text complexity. The Up the Ladder Reading units—one for reading fiction and one for reading nonfiction—begin with the clear expectation that students are in charge of their own reading lives. Agency and independence are stressed across sessions. Students build essential skills such as fluency, envisioning, prediction, making deeper inferences, and finding main ideas.
Although originally designed with grades 4 and 5 in mind, these are units that will help prepare students for grade-level work in the middle school Units of Study in Reading as well. Each unit launches about a four-week stretch of time in your reading workshop, and also your entire year.
For more information, visit UnitsofStudy.com/UptheLadder.
