Teachers College Reading and Writing Project 1st Grade Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007
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Teachers College Reading and Writing Project
1st Grade Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007
Overview
In the teaching of writing, curriculum comes from both the ongoing structures that last
across the year and from the changing units of study that provide learners with their
course-of-travel. The ongoing structures provide a continuity of daily practice and of
coaching, which allows learners to practice and improve skills. (This is necessary
whether the learner is a gymnast, a programmer, a mathematician or a writer). These
structures include minilessons, conferences, partnerships, writing folders, work time and
the like. The units of study, on the other hand, allow students to tackle new and often
increasingly difficult challenges. What’s necessary is education that involves both
ongoing structures and changing units of study.
The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project’s recommended calendar for first
grade writing is designed with New York State’s rigorous assessments and the National
Center for Education and Economy standards in mind. Teachers from other states
sometimes need to alter the curriculum to take into account their state’s standards and
assessments.
This calendar may not exactly match what any one of you might decide to teach across
your year, but we are all excited about this as one highly recommended template. We are
aware, however, that the best curricular calendar is one which a group of teachers
(preferably those across a grade level) co-author together, taking into account their own
areas of expertise and curiosity, their students’ abilities, prior experiences, and interests,
their state and local assessments, and their school’s curricular plans. We therefore
encourage you to adapt this to suit you and yours.
We do not believe there is anything inevitable about this particular curriculum. We know
there are lots of other ways in which teachers-of-writing could imagine a yearlong
writing curriculum. We lay out this one course of study because this is the line of work
that the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project will support across the upcoming
year with conference days. If you and your colleagues find the conference days help your
teaching, you will probably adopt large portions of this as your plan for the year.
Like all our curricular calendars, this one stands on the shoulders of many years of work
in hundreds of classrooms. Unlike the others, a version of this curriculum has been
written in great detail in a series of books, Units of Study in Primary Writing
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NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP
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1st Grade Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007
(Heinemann, 2003). There is also a DVD containing 22 videos which illustrates this
curriculum. (The series and DVD can be ordered at http://www.unitsofstudy.com.)
First Grade Writing Calendar
September Launching the Writing Workshop
October Small Moments
November Writing for Readers
December Authors as Mentors
January Author your own unit: Songs, Scripts, Fairy Tales, Literary
Nonfiction or How To Books
February All About Books
March Independent Writing Projects
April Poetry
May Realistic Fiction
June Revision
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1st Grade Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007
Unit 1 - Launching the Writing Workshop
September
In this unit, we help all children see themselves as authors. Children discover that the
things that happen to them each day are stories worth telling and writing. Your role will
be to act as an interested audience, helping your students feel like real authors. Children
will share oral stories, drawn from their own lives. You and the class can also write
shared stories about episodes the class experiences together. Across this month your
children will probably write between ten and fifteen true stories. They will plan each of
these stories by storytelling them to a partner, and by drawing pictures that match the
story.
During this first unit of study you will try to ensure that each child can carry-on during
the writing workshop by choosing topics, planning for writing, and drafting as best as he
or she can. You always want to start the year by establishing clear structures and routines
for children to follow. Since most of your students will have been in writing workshop
for the past year, they will be familiar with what to expect in a writing workshop. Still,
you will need to remind them of some of the processes: how to move to and from the
meeting area, how to organize their writing folders (ongoing pieces on one side and
finished pieces on the other), and how to keep themselves writing (choosing to add on to
an ongoing piece of writing or to begin a new piece of writing when their first piece is
done). Now is the time to establish boundaries so that children know not to interrupt you
during a conference.
Your first grade writers will need a couple of choices of paper. One kind of paper will
probably contain the expected large boxes for a picture with 2 or 3 lines below for
writing. The other kind of paper might feature a slightly smaller box with 5 or so lines for
writing below. In order to establish a productive hum in your workshops, rally your
students to produce a lot of writing and to write with stamina. If your children are
accustomed to writing in booklets, having left the previous year already doing so and
carrying their stories across a span of pages, then you can give them booklets from the
start. This is what they are used to, and you don’t want to go backwards! Writers with a
very beginning understanding of sound-letter correspondence will just be labeling their
pictures (this is true whether they’re writing in booklets or on single sheets of paper),
while others will write sentences to accompany the drawings. Either way, encourage
children to write more than they at first believed possible. Show examples of student
work which create a horizon for all your writers.
If your children have not been part of a writing workshop in kindergarten, then you’ll
probably start the year by having them write on single sheets of paper. After a week or
so, introduce the idea of adding a second sheet onto the first. Children love the idea of
stapling more pages onto their stories, and the lure of using the stapler will draw them
towards revision. After a few days in which most of the class is engaged in constructing
little booklets, you’ll probably want to expedite matters by giving children prefabricated
booklets of 3 or 4 stapled pages. Once they are writing in booklets, teach them that they
can rehearse for their writing by telling their stories to a partner or by touching each page
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1st Grade Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007
in their booklet and writing-their-story-in-the-air. Students can sketch a picture on each
page to hold that page’s content.
You can help the children who are just representing words with a single letter gain some
independence if you give them direct instruction on using the alphabet chart. Children
may use the alphabet chart to identify what a letter looks like or to identify the sound it
makes. When we hear children say, “How do you spell …?” we can respond with, “Say
the word. What sound do you hear first? Great! Write that down.” Once a child is writing
with initial and final sounds then we can move that child from simply labeling to writing
sentences, and now the child will need paper with a few lines on each page.
If your children did not participate in a writing workshop during kindergarten, you’ll
want to teach your class the concept of choosing topics from their lives. Students can
think about small adventures they’ve had on the bus, in their backyard, on their street, in
their bedrooms, at a relative’s house, in the cafeteria—the works! They can think of
small moment stories linked to any of their favorite things to do. They’ll be drawing on
memories so they can turn to a partner and say, “I remember when I…,” listing times
they’ve experienced. Your instruction will need to remind children that it’s easy for them
to generate ideas for true stories so that you don’t create a situation in your classroom
where children wait for you to give the prompt of the day. Instead, each child should
have a repertoire of ways to access memories. If your children participated in a writing
workshop last year, your instruction will need to remind them to write not about the
whole watermelon topic but about one seed story. Instead of telling the whole visit to
grandmas, a child can tell about how, when washing dishes, she put soap on her nose. If
this is your children’s first writing workshop, they’ll learn about focus in October.
As you get your students to think about their own narratives, you will teach them how to
get back into the habit of telling the small moment stories of their lives. You will likely
find it useful to reserve some time outside the workshop for storytelling. As a class you
can pick some shared experience and tell the story of that experience across fingers and
booklets. You will want to continue to emphasize storytelling that supports your
classroom’s oral language development.
Your children will draw and write as best as they can, working to make their pages match
the movies they have in mind of the unfolding event. You might encourage children to
first close their eyes and envision the event. Then they can write about it as if it’s
happening again.
In this beginning unit of study, continue to emphasize good writing habits such as
rereading and monitoring for sense. Teachers will support students as they use and
develop a repertoire of spelling strategies. You will want your earlier editing lessons to
focus around punctuation and spelling, based on trouble areas you are noticing in student
work. Writers will continue to make use of the word wall, use known words to write
unknown words, and take risks with spelling. Alongside the emphasis on content and
craft, there will always be ongoing work for struggling writers on hearing and recording
sounds and writing with punctuation. Early in the year it is important to place an
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emphasis on rereading. This will help students clarify what they have already said,
determine what else needs to be added, and pay attention to sentence structure.
As you near the end of this unit, teach children that writers revise as part of writing,
easily and in an effort to tell the truth and to put life onto the page in ways that match
reality and make sense. You will teach writers to reread what they have written, and see
what details they may have overlooked, confusions they may have created, or feelings
they want to bring out.
Students who are in the early stages of English language acquisition can participate in the
writing workshop by writing in their native language. When these children do write in
English, they benefit from practicing and rehearsing their writing out loud with a partner.
They will also benefit from learning how to use connectives and transitional words that
will help them move their story along, so when you are with the child in the midst of
storytelling, prompt them with ‘and then…’ and ‘after that…’ transitions in a way that
encourages them to repeat your additions and build upon them.
Writing Partnerships
You will want to teach partners how to read to each other. You can show them how to
share the page and use their pencils to point under words. You’ll also want to teach
partners how to find the most important part of each other’s writing and to say why they
think it is important. Finally, teach partners the sorts of things they might compliment in
each other’s work: topic, actions in the pictures, how the writer makes the people talk.
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October Unit 2 – Small Moments – Personal Narrative
In this unit, we help children value tiny moments from their lives. We teach them that
writers hold these moments in their minds and hearts, then make a story out of them, one
that stretches across a sequence of several pages. Instead of writing about the whole
move from the old house to the new one, a writer writes about saying good-bye to Annie.
The story begins with knocking on her door, then the goodbye, then the writer’s feelings
as she walks away. Then writers reread what they’ve said, and see details they may have
overlooked, confusions they may have created, or feelings they want to bring out.
Writers revise as part of writing, easily and in an effort to tell the truth and to put life onto
the page in ways that match reality and make sense.
By this unit, it is essential that your children are writing in prefabricated 3-4 page
booklets, with paper that matches each child’s level as a writer. Most of your children
should be able to write a sentence or several sentences on each page, so they’ll need
booklets that contain spaces for drawings and for writing on every page. Be sure to
continue spotlighting the importance of drawings, both in this unit and throughout the
year. Be aware that as students begin to work in booklets some may write the entire story
on the first page, while others turn each page into a different story. These problems can
be addressed in small group work.
It is equally important that you immerse your children in good literature during this unit.
Use stories that are small moments. The Roller Coaster by Marla Frazee and Knuffle
Bunny by Mo Willems are good exemplars. In addition to reading picture books, you
will want to create a small moment story together during interactive or shared writing,
one which can serve as a model. Be sure this story is focused; instead of writing all-
about reading workshop time you could write the story of when Peter was reading a
funny book and couldn’t stop giggling so he had to find a special place to sit. The
children will begin to see the difference between “all about” versus “a time when” story.
Storytelling will be an important part of the workshop. Give your children time each day
to tell stories to a long-term partner focusing on sequence. They can think about how
they want to start their stories and end them. They can then sketch these stories across
pages in the prepared booklets.
Direct instruction in spelling strategies and careful assessment of your students’ abilities
in this domain are very important at this stage of the year. To assess your young writers,
first identify their stages of spelling development. These will likely range from random
strings of letters, to initial and final consonants to standard spelling. Some children only
hear initial sounds in a word, and therefore they’ll write by drawing and labeling the
drawing. Help these youngsters hear medial and first sounds! It is critical that your
children learn that they can say a word slowly and write down the sounds they hear,
rather than asking, “How do you spell…?” Teach your students how to use an alphabet
chart, a word wall, and to use a word they know to write an unknown word. Encourage
children to write high frequency words in a snap or by checking the word wall. You can
also teach them to clap out syllables and stretch out words slowly to hear more sounds.
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We want our young writers to be risk takers and to move beyond only writing words they
know how to spell perfectly.
This unit of study emphasizes certain qualities of good writing including focus, detail,
dialogue, setting, sequence, leads, writing with a sense of story, and answering the
reader’s questions. Some teachers find it helpful to have writers close their eyes and
remember themselves doing an activity, recording what they did first and then next.
Teaching children how to focus a small-moment story is central to this month’s work.
You will teach your students to focus so their stories are not bed-to-bed (morning-to-
night), but instead zoom in. Demonstrate for students how you think of big, long events
and then choose just one small thing that happened. For example, if your story is about a
day spent at the beach, tell children that you could write about the whole day there; but,
instead you will choose one thing that happened, the most important one– like when you
were playing in the waves – and write all about that.
If your children participated in a writing workshop during the previous year, it is likely
they will remember that stories include dialogue, small actions, and thoughts. You can
teach them that one way to elaborate on each page of their story is to add in the things
characters say and think, and the small actions they do. Teach children that writers add
details to the important parts of their stories. One way to do this is to think about how a
writer can use small actions to reveal a feeling – to show, not tell. For example, a child
writing about her fear of learning to swim might write, “I stood at the edge of the pool
looking down. My knees started to shake. I held my elbows. ‘Oh no,’ I thought. I didn’t
want to go in the water. My toes hugged the edge.” Emphasize planning small moments,
and help your students draft, using these elements in their writing to show not tell.
Another way to help students elaborate on their writing is to help them thread setting
throughout their pieces. Many students describe the setting at the start of their stories – ‘It
was a cool, sunny day’ – but forget to carry this throughout their pieces. The student who
tells about her fear of learning to swim might include setting later in her piece by writing,
“As I put my foot in the water, the sun hit my eyes. It made me cry, not from sadness but
from sun.” Teach students that by recalling and including details about setting, they help
their readers better envision their story.
Your students will be generating approximately 3 booklets a week. As always, when
getting ready for celebrating, children will each choose one piece to revise, edit and make
beautiful. You can demonstrate that writers reread the writing they’ve chosen to revise,
checking above all that it makes sense. Children can add new details to their story and
revise by adding more to the important part. Another revision technique you may want to
demonstrate is writing endings that stay close to the heart of the story. For example,
instead of a child writing, “Mom put a Band-Aid on my knee and then we went home,”
she can think about the end of that moment and write the exact words of what happened:
“Mom put a Band-Aid on my knee. She gave me a kiss and I felt much better.” You may
want to introduce certain revision tools at this point since the “Revision Unit” won’t
come until the end of the year. Introduce tools such as colored pens, strips of paper and
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tape. Once children revise and do some beginning editing they will be ready to share
their writing with an audience.
Writing Partnerships
Teach partners to plan out their stories together across their fingers and then across the
pages of their booklets. It is most beneficial to have partners sitting next to each other
both during the minilesson and back at their tables.
You can teach partners to help with revision by rereading their stories to each other and
asking, “What else can I add?” or “What else can I do to make this better?”
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November Unit 3 – Writing for Readers: Teaching Skills and Strategies
Prior to this unit, we will have acted as if children’s approximations of letters and words
are fine and dandy. We’ve reveled in their approximations. This study, however, begins
with us confessing to our children that we sometimes have a hard time reading their
writing. It’s as if we let the cat out of the bag. “I took your wonderful stories home last
night,” we say, “And I sat down to read them. But do you know what… I read a bit and
then, I got stuck. I couldn’t figure out what the story was supposed to say! Has that ever
happened to any of you?”
Until now, we’ve so wanted our children to feel good as writers that we have hidden our
struggles to translate their spindly letters into meaning. The problem with this is that the
only reason children will care about spelling, punctuation or white space is that these
conventions make it easier for others to read and to appreciate their texts!
It’s crucial, therefore, that as soon as a child has a prayer of writing in ways a reader
could conceivably read, we let children in on the truth. If we’re going to let them in on
the fact that sometimes we can’t read their writing that until now we’ve accepted with
such open arms… we need to do this in ways which don’t cause our children to despair.
Our goal is to spotlight the importance of spelling and punctuation by designing a unit of
study which makes word walls, blends, and capital letters into the talk of the town.
To start this unit, invite children to sort through their writing folder, creating two piles –
one of readable and one of virtually unreadable writing. Teach them to look specifically
at their handwriting, spaces between words, punctuation and spelling. Then tell children
you’ll help them make their writing more readable.
Specifically, you’ll teach children how to use the resources in your classroom to build a
repertoire for spelling tricky words. Your writers may already know that they can say a
word, say it slowly and write what they hear. You may also use some of the following
prompts in conferences or small group strategy lessons:
“Say the word. Listen to what you hear at the beginning/end. Do you know
another word that has that same sound at the beginning/end?”
“Say the word. Do you know another word that sounds like that word?” Use that
word to write the new word.”
“Say the word. You know how to spell that. It is on our word wall! Write it
quickly.”
You will want to use these same prompts during Interactive Writing and Word Study. It
will be important for these young writers to transfer all that they are learning in these
other components (letter and sound relationships, spelling patterns, and word families)
into their independent writing.
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For example, you’ll teach a lesson early on that explicitly demonstrates how to stretch out
a word, saying it slowly to hear all the sounds. Some teachers even demonstrate by
holding a rubber band in their fingers and stretching it little by little as they say the word
slowly, to physically “stretch” the word.
You’ll teach children to use the word wall to write familiar words “in a snap,” by looking
at the word on the word wall, and then writing it quickly on the page. You’ll show
children how to listen closely to their words to notice when there are no more sounds, and
to put a space about the size of a finger before beginning a new word.
In your conferences, you’ll celebrate each small step along the way – a child who notices
that she needs spaces between words, another who notices letters that are scrunched up, a
child who realizes he forgot to include punctuation.
Meanwhile, remind children to make sure their small moment stories are tightly focused
chronological stories that incorporate story language and structure into their writing.
Teach students that they can make a whole story out of one page in their booklet,
zooming in on the most important part of the story and making sure it all makes sense.
Toward the end of the unit, ask children to write so that their peers can read what they
have written. This big step will require you to teach children how to be good writing
partners. Remind children to give friendly tips and compliments, and to ask questions as
they share and revise their work together. Teach children how to carefully listen to or
read their partner’s work to make sure there aren’t any words missing. Teach them to
help each other with tricky words (without just spelling it for their partner) by stretching
out sounds with a partner and then handing the paper over to the writer to make changes.
Children learn to be “word wall detectives” together, searching for word wall words in a
partner’s writing to circle and help the partner find the correct spelling.
Finally, you’ll celebrate all the hard work your children have done by teaching them to
sort their work once again into harder to read and easier to read piles. Then, each writer
will choose one easy to read piece to celebrate. Some teachers set up a celebration where
the children takes turns being writers sharing their writing, and readers listening to their
classmates’ stories. This sort of celebration gives children the opportunity to observe
changes in one another’s writing since the beginning of the unit and to offer
congratulations on how far they’ve come.
Writing Partnerships
Over the next couple of months you will want to teach students how to talk about their
writing and how to use the accountable moves they are learning in reading in writing.
Teach partners how to reread, asking themselves, “Does that look right?” “Does that
make sense?” Partners can work together rereading and changing their writing to make it
more readable.
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Teach partners to ask each other to say more about a topic, and to ask questions that
address why one or the other of them did something in their writing. “Where is the most
important part?” “What are you trying to show?”
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Unit 4 – Authors as Mentors
December
The most important message we give to children during a writing workshop is this: “You
are writers, like writers the world over.” It makes sense, then, that for at least one unit of
study, children are invited to look closely at the work of one writer and let that writer
function as a mentor.
When deciding upon the whole-class mentor author, a teacher needs to decide if he or she
wants this unit to continue the emphasis on writing personal narratives (or small
moments). Or does the teacher want to broaden the class’ repertoire by launching the
class in doing other kinds of writing? Many teachers in our community have decided to
select an author who writes at least one or two texts that are rather like the small moment
stories the children have been writing, so that at the start of the unit children are able to
use the author to mentor them in this work. But it is also wonderful if the particular
author writes other kinds of texts, too. The unit of study, then, can begin with studying
an author’s small moment stories and then move to studying other kinds of writing the
author has written.
Be sure that you know who and what your students have studied in their Kindergarten
and 1st grade writing workshops. If students studied Donald Crews or Angela Johnson in
previous years, choose a different author to study in 2nd grade. We want to expand our
students’ repertoire of literature and to help them learn from lots of different authors and
pieces of writing.
We recommend these authors, among others, as ones who write very short small moment
stories and other texts which could be wonderful exemplars for children. Be sure to select
an author who will be new (or practically new) to your children.
Angela Johnson Joshua’s Night then move to The Leaving Morning,
Whispers and Do Like Kyla
Ezra Jack Keats The Snowy Day then move to Peter’s Chair and Apt. 3
Joanne Ryder One Small Fish then move to My Father’s Hands
Donald Crews Shortcut then move to Night at the Fair
Students begin this unit thinking about how writers live wide-awake lives, always paying
close attention to the hundreds of rich moments that happen each day that could be a
“seed” for their next story. As you read and reread your mentor author’s books with
students, you will muse about (and in many cases, invent) ways your mentor author may
have done something. Exclaim, “Ezra Jack Keats must have gotten this great idea for his
story, Snowy Day, by watching kids play in the snow and jotting down notes.” Or you
might say, “I bet Donald Crews got the idea for his story, Sail Away, from one day when
he sailed and got stuck in a storm. He must have thought to himself, ‘I need to remember
this moment,’ and then jotted it on a notepad.” You want your students to see their own
lives as full of these small moments, so you might ask them to begin to carry small
notepads (tiny memo pads, or 2” blank squares cut up and stapled together) to record the
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moments that happen throughout each day. You’ll carry your own “tiny topic” notepads,
too, and make a rather public show out of taking them out to record the small moments
that happen in the classroom. “Oh my goodness!” you might say. “Christian just gave me
a poem he wrote for the class. That would make a great story! Let me jot just the words
‘Christian’s poem’ in my tiny topics notepad to hold onto that idea.”
Show students how to take brief notes (like “fell down”), and use those to help them
remember a moment that they’ll stretch out over their five fingers as they plan their
stories with a partner: “I was sliding down the monster slide when Mrs. Martinez yelled,
‘Time to come in! Line up!’ So I stood up at the bottom of the slide and jumped off!
Suddenly, I slipped on a rock. Slam! I hit the ground.”
Meanwhile, you’ll use your mentor author’s books to marvel over the way your mentor
author chooses and stretches out one small moment, instead of running from moment to
moment. “Do you see how in Sail Away, Donald Crews doesn’t tell you all about the
places where the sailboat traveled and the things people did? He doesn’t tell you all about
the swimming they did off the side of the boat, the lunch they ate on the boat, the naps
they took, all the animals they saw… He just focuses on that tiny moment when the
sailboat was caught in the storm, doesn’t he?”
After a few days of collecting moments in tiny topics notepads and writing them across
three pages, you will tell students that it can help to study the work of a mentor author
like Ezra Jack Keats. You’ll ask students, “What do you notice that Ezra has done in his
writing? Why do you suppose he did that? Can you see that technique used somewhere
else in his writing?” Our final and most important question, of course, is “Can you try
using that technique in your own writing?” Children will start to notice that writers think
not only about what they’ll write, but also how they’ll write.
While studying the texts in detail, you and your children might notice that your mentor
author uses punctuation to grow suspense (ellipses, dash marks or commas), or inserts
detailed lists to give readers a clear picture in their minds, or uses short sentences to
convey fast actions. We don’t want our young writers necessarily choosing similar topics
as our mentor author as much as we want them to use similar techniques to make their
own stories come alive. A writer who writes, “I went on the swings. I went high,” might
revise her story to build suspense as Donald Crews has done: “I went on the swings. I
went higher… and higher… and higher.” Or she might use sensory images to describe
the scene, borrowing Jane Yolen’s techniques from Owl Moon. She might write,
“Woosh! The trees above me started to sway. The leaves rustled. The sky filled up with
dark clouds.” Or this writer might use a comparison like Mem Fox does in Zoo-Looking
and write, “I was high in the sky like a bird in fluffy clouds.” It’s helpful to have a few
very simple whole-class stories from earlier in the year that can now be revised as you
and students practice new craft techniques together.
You may feel that your students have had a lot of experience writing and stretching out
small moments in kindergarten and first grade and that, by this time in the year, they are
ready for more than this. If so, you might spend much of the unit using a mentor author’s
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work to explore a new text structure—many moments stories. You’ll teach students that
often books are not just one small moment, but, rather, many moments linked together,
and that these stories are like a necklace containing many small beads (moments). As
you read these stories to students, show them how authors can hold their moments
together with a bigger idea they want to show. Angela Johnson does this in Do Like Kyla
when she shows her big idea—how much the little sister wants to be like her big sister—
through a series of vignettes: copying her hairstyle, fixing the same breakfast, mimicking
her stretching. Show students that they can tell an idea about their life, like, “I’m a super
soccer player,” and then write small, stretched-out moments that show this idea. Students
could then study the mentor author’s books to notice the craft moves and types of detail
the author uses to stretch out each moment. Of course, if you feel your students would
benefit more from a closer study of small moments you will probably just continue
having them write small moment stories, trying to craft these as skillfully as they can.
As your students progress in this unit, be sure to encourage them to continue to use their
revisions tools: colored pens, strips of paper, scissor and tape.
The final goal of this study is to encourage independence. You might do this by giving
children the opportunity in the last days of the study to choose their own mentor authors.
Students could choose an author with a partner or small group, reflecting on that author’s
writerly life, the genre choices the author has made, and reading and rereading to notice
his or her crafting techniques. It is helpful to set children up with individual craft charts
to record what they are finding as they read. Children can try the techniques they’ve
recorded in their own writing, and then develop their writing projects, nourished by the
mentor author. The final message, then, is “Go to it!” resulting in a flurry of “I notice…”
and “I’m going to try…” based on the students’ observations of the writing of new
authors.
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Unit 5 – Optional Units of Study: Author Your Own Unit of Study or How-To
January
Books
Author Your Own Unit
We encourage you to start off the new year by teaching a unit of study that you and your
colleagues co-author together. In early December, we’ll lead conference days designed to
help you author your own unit of study, and we hope you do so in this month, and then
share your unit-of-study with others so that your thinking becomes part of the
foundational knowledge that all of us, as a community, draw upon year after year. In
March, teachers may want to teach a second one of these optional units, and this time
hopefully your teaching can stand on the shoulders of work other teachers have invented
during this January Unit-of-Study.
When you author a unit of study, think first about what your students will actually be
doing in the unit. Will they each write one mega-text (as we’ve become accustomed to
students doing when they write All-About books) or will they write a folder-full of texts,
revising some of these? Then, think about the muscles that want to support as children do
this work. For example, you might tell children that the unit of study is in song writing,
but really, your goals might be for children to learn more about reading-writing
connections and revision, or, alternatively, about literary language.
In every unit, children will progress through the writing process, rehearsing, drafting,
revising and editing. In every unit, children will depend on their understanding of the
qualities of good writing. Eudora Welty once said, “Poetry is the school I went to in order
to learn to write prose.” In this unit, your children might be writing adaptations of fairy
tales or they might be writing songs…. but they will be writing whatever they write in
order to learn to write any kind of text as well as possible.
We will support you in thinking about authoring the units of study described below (you
can be sure we will involve some of you in helping to imagine how these might
conceivably go!) but of course, you may fashion other units of study that we have yet to
imagine. Choose just one of these options!
Option A: Literary Non-fiction
Option B: Rewriting our Own Versions of Fairy Tales
Option C: Letters
Option D: Songs
Option E: Scripts
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Literary Non Fiction
The world of non-fiction writing is an enormous one, and in this unit, children will be
encouraged to write in all the many forms of non-fiction writing that they find in the
world. The unit begins, with children reading non-fiction texts as insiders, thinking,
“How do these texts tend to go?” and making piles of each representing a different way
that non-fiction texts tend to go.
For example, children will find that many writers chronicle the story of their coming-to-
know about a topic. The resulting texts are sometimes referred to as I-search (as opposed
to re-search) texts. You’ll see these books on the shelves of any library. A professional
writer might write about how he came to investigate a colony of gorillas, or the writer
might chronicle her trip to the Statue of Liberty, weaving information about the Statue
into the text. Then, too, children will find that non-fiction writers often pose and then
answer questions. Many writers of non-fiction books pattern their texts.
While children develop a sense of the array of options before them, they can meanwhile
brainstorm in order to decide upon an arena of expertise they want to teach others. As
children did earlier in the year with writing all about books, they can think, “What do I
know a lot about?” and they can list possible sub-topics they could include when
addressing any one topic. This time, however, it is conceivable that teachers may steer
children to write about a topic the class has studied during Social Studies or Science. For
example, each child could conceivably be writing about the culture and geography of
another country.
Perhaps most importantly, children can study beautiful picture books, noticing the craft
that powerful non-fiction writers use. These children will study authors such as Joanne
Ryder, Katherine Lasky, Karla Kushkin, and Jane Yolen, noticing their choice of words,
their use of precise detail, their fondness for surprising facts, and children can write their
own non-fiction picture books, aspiring to write equally well.
This unit will also help children to be more skilled and more flexible readers of non-
fiction texts. The unit will help children read these texts, noticing how they are
structured. That is, a reader of non-fiction will read differently if this is a narrative, or if
this is a question-answer text. This unit will help children appreciate and notice the full
diversity of non-fiction writing.
Adaptations of Fairy Tales and Folk Tales
Teachers who love children’s literature are well- versed in fairy tales and folk tales.
Adaptations of Cinderella and The Three Little Pigs fill our book shelves, and we’ve
loved hearing the familiar tales told from new points of view and seeing them situated in
new settings. Children, however, are less well-versed in fairy tales and folktales, and
many of them have yet to make the spectacular discovery that the same tale can be told in
many ways.
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This unit allows children to study adaptations of fairy tales in an especially intense and
purposeful way—as authors who will, themselves, create their own wild and wonderful
adaptations.
The unit will rely upon previous read-alouds which immerse children in different
versions of a particular fairy tale. One class, for example, may have heard the teacher
read and reread a traditional version of The Three Little Pigs and then Scieska’s version,
told from the point of view of the wolf. Those children, then, might imagine other ways
to adapt this story. What if the story involved dogs instead of pigs? What if it were set in
New York City and not the country—would the pigs build homes? Or bridges? What if
the story had maintained its rural setting but the pigs had been kinder to the wolf? That
is—one point of this unit is to help children know ways in which one plot line can be
tweaked, stretched, twisted so as to create a host of other stories or adaptations. Of
course, teachers can encourage children to think critically about fairy tales, reconsidering
whether the hero (or the villain) needs to be a boy, whether it’s the girl who needs to
saved by a boy, etc.
Meanwhile, however, there is another goal to this unit. When children are invited to
borrow and adapt a story they know well, this allows them to use the initial story (and its
literary syntax) as a scaffold for their own emerging abilities as storytellers and story
writers. That is, a second goal of this unit is to help children incorporate literary language
into their writing. This includes writing to create a mood, to develop a scene, to build
tension, to dramatize a character. Then, too, we are confident that children will make lots
of reading and writing connections when their writing is so closely allied to their reading.
A word of caution: This unit MUST invite each child to create his or her very own text.
Of course the classroom community will grow ideas together, but the goal is not
conformity but creativity. Be sure the child progresses through the writing process as
usual; that is, that each writer plans, drafts and revises each of the stories he or she writes.
Build a World for Writing: Letter Writing and a Post Office; Song Writing and a
Jamboree; Script Writing and a Theater Troupe
This optional unit of study gives teachers and children across a grade-level a chance to
tackle a writing project and to build a world in which literacy makes all the difference.
Some groups of teachers may decide to tackle a letter writing effort, others will take on
song writing or script writing, still other teachers will take on something that has yet to be
imagined! Either way, teachers will show children how writers go about learning to do a
new kind of writing. That is, whatever the genre might be, writers will learn to collect
examples of that kind of writing, to notice what those writers tend to do, to imagine the
life those writers probably led that allowed them to do this writing…and then children
will set out to live similar writerly lives.
In some classrooms, children will write letters. Letter writing begins, of course, with
believing you have something to say to someone that can make a difference. Perhaps
children will first think hard about ways in which we can say those age-old things—I
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love you, thanks a lot, I wish you the best, good bye, I miss you, here is my news. Of
course, these children will be writing in the form which is sometimes referred to as “the
friendly letter” but hopefully this time, the instruction will not focus simply on the
salutations and the address! Instead, teach children that when we think hard about the
person to whom we write, our words can be ones which reach straight to the heart. Teach
children too, that details matter, and that audience-awareness begins in this most intimate
content.
Of course, if you decide to teach children to write letters, you will also want to teach
children that persuasive letters can make a real-world difference. Tell children stories of
the class in New Hampshire that proposed a state-animal and ended up addressing the
state assembly. Tell children stories about children who have protested when a park was
being turned into parking lot and actually managed to save a patch of earth. Teach
children that in order to make a real-world impact, writers need to think very carefully
about the arguments that will convince this particular audience, addressing counter
arguments. They also need to realize that anecdotes have the power to touch and move
people, and to embed anecdotes into arguments, doing so in ways that evoke a response.
Songs
Songs permeate the environment in which our kids live. Our children are immersed in the
songs they hear on the radio, the songs that accompany television shows, the lullabies
their grandma sings to them. Some children can recite the lyrics of a song quicker than
they can remember their own addresses! If we remind children that songs are literature,
just like the stories and poems they write in the writing workshop, then we can use the
tune, language, and rhythm in songs to draw our children towards the world of literary
language. How important it is to teach kids that they, too, can create beautiful and
powerful lyrics…and that these lyrics can reflect the truths of their own lives. We can
energize our classrooms so that our students are clapping, humming and memorizing the
literary language from each other’s songs.
To author this unit, you may want to reread your notes on a poetry writing workshop and
think, “How is this the same? How is this different?” Certainly, you will want to be sure
to emphasize that songs, like all writing that children do during the writing workshop,
need to convey content that matters. Invite children to write songs about things that
matter to them. They can write songs about the things that happen to them, the ways they
feel, the things they know all about.
In your unit, you may teach children that rhythm can help us structure a song and how
choruses create cohesion (you may not use that term!). Children can create raps,
lullabies, rock songs, or ballads. Youngsters can create songs of protest, songs of
happiness, songs celebrating city life. Many children will already have a tune in mind
(like Twinkle Twinkle) and write a song to fit that tune. Other kids will write their lyrics
and then later add a tune or beat that seem to match the song.
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After kids have created many songs, you may decide to invite each child to choose a few
songs to create his or her own “album.” They may conceivably celebrate by passing out
lyrics and teaching each other how their songs can be sung, or by putting their songs to
music using those wonderful xylophones that some schools still have!
Scripts
Young children are born entertainers. They love dressing up, taking on roles, using
funny voices and acting things out. If you give children a chance to both write and direct
their very own life stories, while also performing in plays written by their classmates, you
will no doubt be a big hit! You can tell children that for this unit, they’ll be playwrights,
putting their lives into scenes on the page and then onto the stage.
In this unit of study, remind children to bring all they know about stories, characters, and
dramatization to their writing. For this kind of writing, teach children that they’ll write
both dialogue and stage directions.
Children will need to capture dialogue between characters. Young playwrights will
decide small, precise actions that children will incorporate into their plays, weaving
together action and discipline. Teach children that actors often exaggerate their facial
expressions and words to prompt reactions from the audience.
You can also teach children to bring viewers into the world of their plays by describing
where their stories take place (some children might opt to have a narrator announce the
play’s setting: “A sunny afternoon at the playground” or “A snowy hill in the middle of
winter, morning.”) Encourage children to draw on their imaginations when they do this.
Tell them that playwrights often successfully convey their stories through settings with
minimal backdrops and props. You might want to limit the number of props children can
use, suggesting that they think of inventive ways to use one thing – a chair, perhaps – to
represent many things in their stories.
Once they’ve written first drafts of a play, young playwrights will work in partnerships to
make sure their dialogue sounds true to life, that actors can follow the cues in the scripts
and the audience can settle into the landscape of the play. Toward the end of this unit,
playwrights will gather up a set of actors for their play and rehearse the script, thinking
about the dialogue, the actions on stage, and the backdrop.
As a final celebration, each group of actors will perform for the entire class. You’ll want
to encourage children to be quiet during performances, keeping their eyes on the stage
and their hands in their laps. You can tell them that at the end of the performance, when
the actors take a bow, they’ll have a chance to clap and shout out “Bravo” or “Hoorah.”
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II. Nonfiction Writing: How-To Books
Begin this unit by telling children that writers not only use their writing to tell the rich
stories of their lives, but also to teach others. Writers can teach all-about a topic, in which
case the writing is informational, or they can teach people how-to do something, in which
case the writing is procedural. This unit focuses on the latter. The world is filled with
“procedural” writing – cookbooks, instructions for new toys and games, craft projects to
make….and so on. You’ll want to immerse the children in the sounds of these texts by
choosing a few to read aloud and study, examining how writers use their words and
pictures to teach readers. Some good models of procedural books include “How to Carve
a Pumpkin” in The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons, or How to Make a Bird Feeder by
Liyala Tuckfield (Rigby Literacy).
In this unit we invite children to become not only writers but also teachers and then
suggest that they use writing as a way to teach others. We help them teach others how-
to-do something by writing books in which they draw and then tell about a sequence of
steps they hope the learner will take. This kind of procedural writing requires
explicitness, clarity, sequence and that writers write in a way that anticipates what their
readers will need to know.
Just as you used storytelling to help writers develop language that more closely matches
the language of good storytellers, you’ll want to coach students to tell and retell class
activities in ways that teach others. They can teach each other how-to go across the
monkey bars without falling, or how to make flowers out of tissue paper. Teach children
not only to use ordinal words to organize their thinking but also that writers use very
specific language when they’re teaching. A writer wouldn’t just write, “Get toothpaste.”
Instead, he’d write, “Squirt toothpaste onto the toothbrush.” One of these how-to texts
can be written into a class book during interactive or shared writing.
After students practice on whole class topics, they can begin rehearsing their own stories.
We never want to limit the possible language and word choices children might know and
use. Encouraging them to use words like ‘first,’ ‘then,’ ‘next,’ ‘afterwards,’ ‘before,’
‘finally,’ ‘last,’ is important as these convey timing and order. We also want children to
think about the precise words they use to convey actions. If a student writes, “Then you
put the chocolate in the milk,” have her think about how she does it, or actually
demonstrate the action. Chances are the word ‘pour’ will come to her mind. We want
children thinking about and using all the words they know to convey precisely what to do
and how to do it.
You may need to help your students think of things they could teach others. These will
likely be simple things that students do every day, such as ‘How to Make a Good
Pancake’ Or, ‘How to Teach Your Dog to Roll Over.’ For now, steer your more
struggling students away from difficult procedures; tackling these at this stage will only
frustrate them. You will want to teach students that in order to write procedural texts,
they need to envision the steps they go through when they perform a given task, seeing it
“like a movie in their minds,” and then write each step they saw in their “movie.” Often,
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students will leave out big steps or assume their readers know more than they do. It helps
to have students pretend to act out the steps a writer has detailed—ask one partner to read
the steps and the other to follow them.
During this unit, you will continue having writing partnerships confer with one another to
check each other’s writing for sense. You will also teach children how to listen to each
other’s writing in order to follow the steps laid out to see if they work. This is important
because it will show the writer the effect his choice of words and steps has on a reader.
This will help the writer revise and make his text more precise.
You’ll look at nonfiction ‘how to’ texts as a class and use these as guides for revising and
adding features of nonfiction to your students’ own pieces. These books are valuable
models of the possible components of a ‘how to.’ Some ‘how to’ books and manuals
include a materials page. Others include CAUTIONS or WARNINGS for the reader.
Some ‘how to’ books have an introduction enticing the reader to read on. Other ‘how
tos’ have an ending that brings everything to a conclusion like, “Then you eat it up.
‘Yum-yum.’” Students can learn about these kinds of additions by studying a text, and
then add the ones they like to their own books.
As students begin revising their pieces, you’ll want them to examine their ‘how tos’ for
clarity, perhaps thinking more about how readers might perform certain steps. For
example a student who writes “Put your arms by your ears and get ready to dive” might
ask herself, “How? How should I place my arms by my ears? Arms are straight,
stretching forward. You should squeeze your elbows to your ears. It should feel like you
are hugging them.” As they revise, young writers can begin incorporating further
conventions of the ‘how to’ genre, such as making their pictures teach even more by
eliminating extraneous details, zooming in close on the part of the picture that teaches,
and using labels and arrows in their pictures. They might add warnings or advice that
steer readers out of trouble: “Start pedaling. If you fall to one side, lean the other way.”
They can write introduction pages and revise the endings of their ‘how tos’ to let the
reader know it’s time to enjoy their hard work: “Eat it all up! Yum!”
Encourage students who are struggling with stamina in the writing workshop and with
hearing multiple sounds in words to continue labeling their pictures. Labeling the objects
in the pictures will also support language acquisition for English language learners by
providing them the vocabulary they can then bring to the sentence level. Teach more
proficient writers how to make longer books and use punctuation as they write both
simple and more complex sentences.
Celebrate students’ hard work by creating small centers where students can teach a small
group of people how-to perform their task, visit younger students and become their
“Teacher-for-a-Day”, or hang their how-tos in the hallway with a stapled example of
actual materials used or a finished product beside it.
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