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 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. With these units, you will teach the routines of a writing workshop while helping your students embrace their identities as writers.
Unit 1, Launching the Writing Workshop, introduces students to their new identities as writers and invites them into the structure of a writing workshop. In Unit 2, Show and Tell Writing, children will learn to make texts that are a written version of show-and-tell time, harnessing the natural power of show and tell 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, introduces students to narrative writing, highlighting the importance of telling and writing true stories that honor their families and cultures and value ordinary everyday life. Unit 4, Persuasive Writing of All Kinds: Using Words to Make a Change, is a persuasive writing unit that teaches students not just how to write, but also why writers write, immersing them in real-world purposes for writing. By the end of this writing workshop, your students will have the skills necessary to continue writing throughout the summer, into first grade and beyond.
There will also be freestanding out-of-the-box units that can be inserted 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.
Grade K 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 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.
