By Lauren Gould
Our new 3-5 Units of Study in Writing will be released in July. These combine years of study and classroom practice with innovative new lessons based on the latest research. Here’s a tour of some of the highlights!
What’s new in the lessons?
Two Page Spread: Our new mini-lessons are displayed across a two page spread. These lessons, following our classic structure and full of charts, tools, and examples, are easier than ever to read and bring to life with your students.
Small Group, Coaching, and Conferring Plans: Each mini-lesson has an accompanying section with plans for work time. This includes plans and resources for small groups, coaching, and conferring to support you in responding to student needs.
Today Your Students Will Section: Each lesson is framed with a quick “In this Session” section that explains what you will teach and what your students will do. These descriptions help make the big writing work of work time clear.
Ensuring Access: You will see Ensuring Access sections at the start of each session that give specific tools and strategy ideas to teach a wide range of learners, including students with identified learning needs and multilingual learners. This section helps make the ultimate goal of the session clear and supports teachers in making decisions to best respond to their students.
Spanish Language Supports: To help support access to the lessons in Spanish, each unit includes the teaching points in Spanish as well as charts translated into Spanish! Every lesson also comes with an introduction video in Spanish, to help prime the learning.
What new digital tools accompany the lessons?
AI Generated Feedback: We’ve built a platform that allows teachers to harness the capabilities of AI to give tailored feedback to students! Students will be able to submit their writing, and teachers can use AI to generate feedback. In this process, the teacher will be key! The teacher will approve, edit, and send all feedback generated by AI.
Video Lessons: Back by popular demand, each session includes a video of staff developers teaching the mini-lesson. Teachers have found these videos are great for quick planning–seeing the lesson-in-action can be great inspiration for how you will bring the lesson to life in your classroom and tailor it to be responsive to your students.
Slides: It’s true that for years, we professed slides had no place in the writing workshop. However, as we’ve been in thousands of classrooms alongside teachers and students and been studying the research on slides and design, we created state-of-the-art, student-facing slides. You will find these simple, concise, and full of strategies for your students to tackle the learning for the day.
What’s new across the units?
Grammar and Spelling Conventions: Each grade-level kit includes a Grammar and Spelling Conventions book, chock full of short, 5-7 minute grammar extensions. These extensions accompany each of the four grade-level writing units, align with state standards, and bring the latest grammar research to life in engaging instruction and transferable practice.
Spelling Modules, Grades 3-5: This book, spanning 3rd-5th grade, is filled with more than 100 micro-lessons to support students with foundational spelling. Like the Grammar Extensions, these will take about 5-7 minutes each. You’ll teach kids the why behind spelling generalizations, and invite students to practice reading, building, spelling, and editing words in ways that will transfer to their writing across the day!
Supporting all Writers: Looking for more support with high-leverage small group work and conferences? This book will help you! This book contains progressions of small group plans organized by genre. From supporting striving scholars to helping those already excelling, this book is a treasure trove of ideas to spark your creativity and tailor instruction to your students’ needs.
Interested in learning more? Read our webpage on the Units of Study In Writing, Grades 3-5, watch the Virtual Showcase, or preorder here.