"The start of first grade is a time for dusting off the skills and habits that children learned during kindergarten. In the first unit, Building Good Reading Habits, you'll reinforce children's learning from kindergarten, and you'll establish ability-based partnerships that tap into the social power of peers working together to help each other become more strategic as readers. The second unit, Learning About the World: Reading Nonfiction, taps into children's natural curiosity as they explore nonfiction, while you teach comprehension strategies, word solving, vocabulary, fluency, and author's craft. The third unit, Readers Have Big Jobs to Do: Fluency, Phonics, and Comprehension, focuses on the reading process to set children up to read increasingly complex texts. The last unit of first grade, Meeting Characters and Learning Lessons: A Study of Story Elements, spotlights story elements and the skills that are foundational to literal and inferential comprehension, including empathy, imagination, envisioning, prediction, character study, and interpretation"--provided by publisher.

"In second grade, children move from a "little-kid" focus on print to a "big-kid" focus on meaning. The first unit, Second-Grade Reading Growth Spurt, teaches children to take charge of their reading, drawing on everything they know to figure out hard words, understand author's craft, and build big ideas about the books they read. Children learn that books can be their teachers in the second unit, Becoming Experts: Reading Nonfiction, in which they learn more about familiar topics and grow understanding of new topics while working on word solving, vocabulary development, and comparing and contrasting information across texts. In the third unit, Bigger Books Mean Amping Up Reading Power, children learn strategies to build three foundational reading skills--fluency, understanding figurative language, and comprehension. In the final unit for second grade, Series Book Clubs, children work within book clubs to study author's craft to understand ways authors use word choice, figurative language, punctuation, and even patterns to construct a series and evoke feelings in readers"--Pearson.com.

"The new Units of study in phonics provide a lean and concise instructional pathway in phonics that is realistic and doable, and that taps into kids' skills and energy for tackling the fabulous challenge of learning to read and write, introduce high-leverage phonics concepts and strategies in a way that keeps pace with students' reading and writing and helps them understand when, how, and why they can use phonics to read and write, offer delightfully fun and engaging storylines, classroom mascots, songs, chants, rhymes, and games to help students fall head over heels in love with phonics and to create a joyous community of learners, align with state-of-the-art reading and writing workshops for a coherent approach in which terminology, tools, rituals, and methods are shared in ways that benefit both teachers and kids."--provided by publisher.

"An outstanding publication on the latest developments in writing instruction."--Language Arts

"Writing allows each of us to live with that special wide-awakeness that comes from knowing that our lives and our ideas are worth writing about." -Lucy Calkins Teaching Writing is Lucy Calkins at her best-a distillation of the work that's placed Lucy and her colleagues at the forefront of the teaching of writing for over thirty years. This book promises to inspire teachers to teach with renewed passion and power and to invigorate the entire school day. This is a book for readers who want an introduction to the writing workshop, and for those who've lived and breathed this work for decades. Although Lucy addresses the familiar topics-the writing process, conferring, kinds of writing, and writing assessment- she helps us see those topics with new eyes. She clears away the debris to show us the teeny details, and she shows us the majesty and meaning, too, in these simple yet powerful teaching acts. Download a sample chapter for more information.