Up the Ladder Reading: Fiction 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 reading fiction. By instilling strong habits and routines, this start-of-the-year unit will prepare students to take charge of their own reading lives.
The unit:
- establishes the critical structure of read-aloud, utilising authentic texts woven into the minilessons to model the essential skills of fluency, envisioning, prediction, and making deeper inferences;
- invites readers to develop literary discourse and engage in shared interpretation through reading partnerships;
- teaches students to recognise and select appropriately levelled, just-right books with agency and independence;
- moves readers quickly up levels of text complexity, utilising running records and performance assessments to gauge students’ fluency and ability to do higher-level comprehension work;
- builds capacity for writing about reading through flagging, jotting ideas, and developing reading notebooks as places to record and grow thinking around books;
- includes suggestions for adapting the unit for middle school with alternate mentor texts.
Students will come away from this unit as reinvigorated, changed readers—seeing themselves, their books, and their world differently.
When Lucy and her coauthors worked on the
Units of Study, they had to make a choice whether to “make shoes that fit—or shoes to grow into.” They chose the latter, writing that curriculum for kids who are growing up within Units of Study reading and writing workshops. This means that each unit assumes students have experienced the unit that came before it. But that, of course, won’t be the case for upper-grade students entering reading and writing workshops for the first time.
The
Up the Ladder books are designed to help classes with upper-grade students who are new to workshop instruction or who are currently working below benchmark levels. The units meet students where they are and accelerate the development of their skills in narrative, information, and opinion writing (in the 3 writing units), and fiction and nonfiction reading (in the 2 reading units).
The
Up the Ladder units are designed to be absolutely engaging for students in grades 3 and up, but the primary goal has been to ensure that students make rapid, dramatic progress toward grade-level work. Lucy Calkins has analysed the progression of skills taught across elementary and middle-school grades, identified the most critical foundational skills, and then devised the Up the Ladder units to give students a clear pathway to support the development of these key skills.
Preview samples
Visit the
Lucy Calkins site where you can discover all the latest components in this series and preview samples.