Units of Study

"Good teaching pays off. When you provide students with constant opportunities to read and to write, and when you actively and assertively teach into their best efforts, their literacy development will astonish you, their parents, the school administrators—and best of all, the students themselves."

— Lucy Calkins

Reading & Writing 3rd Editions! View Samples

K-2 Reading 3-5 Reading K-2 Writing 3-5 Writing

Units of Study - Writing

The new primary Units of Study in Reading and Writing represent wholesale changes. The best of all that was offered in the previous editions has been streamlined, clarified, and kept, but the new units are new indeed. Lucy Calkins and the coauthors worked diligently to incor porate all their latest thinking and learning into the new units including:

research on the science of reading;
new comprehension research;
language research, including support for foundational skills such as grammar;
new research on writing, including writing from sources;
and research on knowledge generation.

The Units of Study address the full range of domains emphasized by the reading research community to provide a truly research-based approach that brings the best of what we know into classrooms in ways that will spark joy and provide teachers with the tools they need to teach responsively.

K-2, 3rd Edition Grades 3-5, 3rd Edition Grades 6-8, 2nd Edition

Units of Study - Reading

The Units of Study in Reading, Grades K–5 have been completely revised and updated to reflect current research in literacy instruction. Aligned with Science of Reading principles and the Reading Rope framework, these units are designed to support the integration of word recognition and language comprehension, while reinforcing the development of foundational skills—including phonological awareness, phonics, and decoding—in the early grades and continued work with fluency, vocabulary, knowledge building, and comprehension across Grades 3–5.

These new editions reflect a clear commitment to research-aligned practice. There is no instruction anchored in three-cueing, nor do the new editions encourage kids to guess at words in lieu of decoding. Instead, students are taught to attend to print and read with increasing independence and understanding.

K-2, 3rd Edition Grades 3-5, 3rd Edition Grades 6-8, 2nd Edition

Up the Ladder Reading

How do you support upper-grade and middle school readers if they are new to the norms and culture of reading workshop, particularly if they may also have missed some foundational instruction in reading fiction and nonfiction? How do you do this in a way that builds a strong reading community and strong habits and routines? How do you approach all this if you are new to the teaching of reading workshop? The Up the Ladder Reading units offer a very good place to start.

Up the Ladder Writing

The new Up the Ladder units are designed for children in grades 3–6 who may not yet have had many opportunities to practice writing narrative, information, and opinion pieces, or might not have had those experiences in workshop-style classrooms. The units give these children opportunities to engage in repeated successful practice and to move rapidly along a gradually increasing progression of challenges. Frequent checkpoints channel kids to double-check that their work has gotten substantially better. At each of these checkpoints, they—and you—will see that their growth has been dramatic.

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