Calkins Unit Studies: Grades 3-5
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Join your Calkins colleagues in grades 3-5 for an in-depth look at two units of study:
•Breathing Life into Essays (March 12): Help students to “grow” essays out of everyday living. This session builds on the idea of “teaching the writer, not the writing.” This Unit of Study helps students to continue to develop a repertoire of strategies for collecting entries or ideas for topics to write about. Students will learn to be observers in their lives, pushing themselves to develop thoughts in response to what they see and use writing as a way of thinking.
•Writing Fiction: Big Dreams, Tall Ambitions (May 7): Students will learn to take the tiny details and big issues of their lives and speculate on how that could become a story. The “story mountain” becomes a tool not just for revision, but for planning their stories as students incorporate all they learned during the personal narrative unit of study. This session will show children that in fiction as in life, the solutions we find are generally those that we make, and if there are magic answers, they usually have been there before our eyes all along.
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