About the Units
Overview of Grade K Units
Unit 1: Making Friends with Letters
Over the course of this unit, you’ll immerse your children in letters and sounds, rhyme and word play. Your kids will grow in leaps and bounds. This unit supports a variation of Patricia Cunningham’s beloved “Star Names” unit. On almost every day throughout the unit, the class will study another name. You’ll use your children’s names, and the letters in those names, to teach phonics concepts. Over the course of the unit you will build a name wall which will eventually contain all of the names in your class.
Unit 2: Word Scientists
In this unit, you will focus on letter knowledge and letter-sound correspondence, phonological awareness, and high-frequency words. You’ll work with kids to study the alphabet chart, to use the alphabet to write, and to study and use high-frequency words to read and write. In each bend, you’ll introduce songs, games, poems, and nursery rhymes that you’ll revisit again and again to support phonemic awareness and early reading concepts.
Unit 3: Word-Part Power
You’ll start this unit with a bend that help all your students make that giant step from writing labels to writing sentences. In Bend II, kids learn to use word-part power to grasp the power of phonograms. We also introduce the word wall to support kids in learning a growing number of high-frequency words. In Bend III, students learn that the words at, in, it, and an have word power and can be made into lots of other words. We introduce digraphs (sh, th, wh, ch) and use them with word parts to make even more words.
Unit 4: Vowel Power
At the start of this unit, we add a new super power: vowel power! You will introduce new high-frequency words, am and did, that further students’ study of short A and short I. As the first bend gives way to the second bend, you’ll continue the puzzling work of distinguishing short-vowel sounds from one another. In the third bend, students will study vowels in words that are longer than CVC words. You’ll teach children how knowledge of CVC words is foundational to writing any words they choose.
Unit 5: Playing with Phonics
This unit is designed to be whimsical, experimental, joyful and most of all, fun, as students are introduced to blends and think about not only what sounds letters make, but the instances in which those sounds are changed, muted, or manipulated by neighboring letters. This unit challenges students to to tackle longer words and to begin thinking about the sounds that they hear in word parts or phonograms. The unit culminates with phonics projects that draw on all the phonics work children have engaged in during their kindergarten year.
Overview of the Grade 1 Units
Unit 1: Talking and Thinking About Letters
This unit has big goals. First off, the unit provides cumulative review and reinforcement for key concepts in phonics that students encountered in kindergarten. The unit moves very quickly, as one might expect of a review, and it touches on all the most important phonics concepts from kindergarten: letter names and sounds, short vowels in CVC words, phonograms, blends, and digraphs, and a short list of approximately fifty high-frequency and high-utility words.
Unit 2: The Mystery of the Silent e
Unit 2 challenges children to use phonics workshop as a place to study words closely like a piece of evidence and make discoveries to help them understand how language works. In the first bend, this investigation will focus entirely on CVCe words with the vowel A. Across the first bend, you’ll also introduce a new set of high-frequency words. Bend II asks your detectives investigate CVCe words with a different vowel each day. In Bend III, the focus shifts to looking closely at words and word parts to decode difficult words by breaking them into parts and putting those parts back together.
Unit 3: From Tip to Tail: Reading Across Words
In this unit, you’ll rally kids to read nonfiction closely and thoughtfully. In Bend I, you’ll point out that doing so involves looking all the way across words. In Bend II, you’ll teach kids common phonograms that contain blends and digraphs. Bend III focuses on high-frequency words. It’s helpful for young readers to orient themselves to a page by scanning that page and noting upcoming high-frequency words—and their knowledge of these words can help them read other words by extension. The bend and the unit wrap up with a big celebratory tournament of word games!
Unit 4: Word Builders: Using Vowel Teams to Build Big Words
You’ll launch this unit by introducing the theme of becoming word builders. Using snap cubes with word parts, children will get to work constructing words, and challenge themselves to build longer, bigger words. Alongside your teaching about vowel teams in this first bend, you’ll also introduce a new set of high-frequency words. Bend II tackles a whole different group of vowel teams, ones that need to be explicitly taught. Bend III focuses on less common vowel teams. The unit ends with a celebration where you’ll reveal a big plan to build a whole town made out of words—Vowel Town!
Unit 5: Marvelous Bloopers: Learning Through Wise Mistakes
This unit has been designed to help you teach an assortment of topics that the first grade curriculum hasn’t yet addressed and that deserve attention before the year is over: r-controlled vowels, high frequency words, capitalization… The ellipses in that sentence are important because this unit, like the final unit in kindergarten, is deliberately designed so that it will set you up to continue teaching other assorted topics if you have more time in your school year and if your students are game to learn yet other topics: prefixes, contractions, punctuation.
Overview of the Grade 2 Units
Unit 1 Growing into Second-Grade Phonics
The goal with this unit is to grow students’ phonics knowledge so they know more of the options for how words could go. Alongside knowledge about words and spelling, you will teach the grit and intellectual curiosity they need to try to get closer to the right spelling. Bend I revisits the long list of phonics principles that students learned in kindergarten and first grade, and then gives particular attention to silent E, long vowels, vowel teams, and R-controlled vowels. The second bend asks students to spell tricky snap words correctly, punctuate sentences, and use capital letters. The unit also introduce the tricky concept of homophones. The third bend is a joyous exploration of rhymes and rimes that shows students that reading and writing part by part is more efficient than reading and writing letter by letter.
Unit 2 Big Words Take Big Resolve: Tackling Multisyllabic Words
The books that many second-graders read are full of multisyllabic words, and so instruction in this unit transitions to a focus on longer, more complex words. Across the first bend, you’ll teach several strategies for decoding multisyllabic words—working methodically from left to right, breaking words into syllables, breaking off inflected endings—but your larger goal is to help kids develop the stance that readers tackle challenges, rather than back away from them. The second bend sheds light on the complex consonant combinations: kn, wr, and gn; how to be flexible with the hard and soft sounds of C and G; and the many facets of gh. You’ll also teach students that when they hear /j/ at the end of a word they want to write, it is likely spelled with ge or dge. In Bend III, you’ll turn your attention to the endings, or tails, of words and concepts such as adding -ing and -ed to words ending in silent E, doubling consonants before adding endings, making words plural with -s or -es, changing Y to I before adding -es or -ed, and -tion.
Unit 3 Word Builders: Construction, Demolition, and Vowel Power
This unit helps all children develop a repertoire of skills for tackling complex, multisyllabic words with confidence. Following a storyline where your class applies for a job to become word builders, you’ll teach students that a word builder needs to be able to build words in big efficient parts, syllable by syllable. In the first bend, you’ll introduce the emphasis on vowels that is threaded across the unit and you’ll support children with using common phonograms to represent vowel sounds. In the second bend, you will tell students they have been selected to serve on a special task force in vowels. Your class will create a vowel manual as a tool to help people with spelling long-vowel sounds in big words. Across the bend, your students will tackle long vowels, identifying some of the most common spellings for each vowel sound and creating word sorts with each of these spellings. In Bend III, the focus shifts from spelling big words to decoding big words. Building off the work they did in Unit 2, students will add to their repertoire of strategies for breaking big words into manageable parts by paying close attention to vowels.
Unit 4 Word Collectors
Research is clear that for children’s vocabularies to blossom and grow, they need access to language and all the forms it takes—listening to, talking with, reading and writing of language in playful and constructive ways. The first bend of this unit focuses on fostering word consciousness. You’ll begin by reading The Word Collector by Peter H. Reynolds. Like the main character, Jerome, students learn to gathers words everywhere they go. They store words they learn first in shared word collector folders and later in their own word collector scrapbooks. You’ll teach students that you can take one word, like paradise, and then think of other words that relate to it: utopia, candy shop, and perfection, to name a few. In Bend II, the focus shifts to studying compound words, with the aim of learning that word parts not only help readers to break a word apart, but also help them determine the meaning of a word, and then can be mixed and matched to make many new words. Bend III shifts students’ focus to prefixes and suffixes and their effect on base words.