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ElementaryMicroCourses Grades 3, 4 & 5

MicroCourses are short, grade-specific courses that offer an alternative to the drudgery of basals and the excesses of “comprehensive programs.” MicroCourses are focused on critical aspects of the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and are specifically designed to help students develop the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in middle school and high school. All MicroCourses feature work with complex texts and are marked by sequences of close reading, text-based writing, and collaborative discussion.

Two-Unit MicroCoursesTwo-Unit MicroCourses are comprised of separate, but related, units that ask students to focus on sequences of work carefully designed to help them develop the ability to read, as well as write and talk about increasingly complex texts. MicroCourse units can be implemented back-to-back or spaced across a semester or a year. Research clearly supports the idea that students need multiple opportunities to learn and practice what they’re learning with different types of texts. MicroCourses provide students with exactly those opportunities.

CLOSE READING: INFORMATIONAL TEXTS

UNIT 1: Close Reading Social Studies

Grade 3: Unearthing Pompeii Introductions to the close reading of complex informational texts, these social studies-focused units carefully scaffold students through cycles of comprehension and analysis work marked by reading, writing, and collaborative discussion. Students learn to determine and analyze the development of central ideas and arguments in informational texts. In addition, they learn to describe the language and methods writers employ to develop content. Units culminate in performance tasks in which students compose explanatory essays.

Grade 4: Push & Pull of Immigration

Grade 5: Pioneers

UNIT 2: Close Reading Science

Grade 3: Animal Communication Anchored by readings in science, these units build on the teaching and learning approaches established in Unit 1 and are designed to give students additional practice in reading and analyzing informational texts. Texts in these units pose content and genre challenges that are different than the social studies readings in Unit 1, thereby allowing students to practice determining and analyzing the development of the central ideas with more challenging texts. Each unit culminates in performance tasks in which students compose explanatory essays.

Grade 4: Analyzing Main Ideas (Orange Roughy)

Grade 5: Analyzing Main Ideas (Tuberculosis)

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ElementaryGrades 3, 4 & 5 MicroCourses

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CLOSE READING: LITERARY TEXTS

UNIT 1: Reading and Writing about Theme

Grade 3: Folktales and Messages Each single-text module in this series serves as an important introduction to close reading of short fiction and to ways of determining, analyzing, and writing about themes in texts. These modules carefully scaffold students through cycles of comprehension and analysis work marked by reading, writing, and collaborative discussions. Students learn foundational ways of working with theme, a literary concept that is featured prominently at all grades in the Common Core ELA standards beginning at grade 3. Units culminate in performance tasks in which students compose explanatory essays.

Grade 4: Thinking Through Big Ideas and Themes

Grade 5: Themes in Literature

UNIT 2: Themes across Texts

Grade 3: Messages Within and Across Folktales

Building on the study of theme in Unit 1, these grade-level units position students to read, write, and think about theme across two texts. Intertextual work plays a prominent role in the Common Core. In these studies, students have opportunities to apply the same habits of reading, writing, and speaking about theme across texts, as they learned in the single-text studies of Unit 1. Units culminate in performance tasks in which students compose explanatory essays.

Grade 4: Big Ideas and Themes Across Texts

Grade 5: One Author, Two Texts: Themes Across Texts (Author: Tim Wynne-Jones)

One-Unit MicroCoursesOne-unit MicroCourses engage students in rigorous intertextual work that unfolds over the course of several weeks. These MicroCourses offer a single unit that features extended reading and writing projects that take students deeply into texts, tasks, and topics that are interesting and worthy of sustained attention.

CREATING A TEXT-BASED CULTURE

Grade 3: Setting up the Literacy Studio: An Elementary Investigation

These MicroCourses are designed to help grade-level teachers establish rich, inquiry-based classroom cultures. In each study, self-selected reading, writing, and work with shared texts intertwine in ways that increase engagement and provide intensive practice with reading, writing, and text-based discussion. Teachers work with students to establish essential rituals, routines, tools, and practices around independent reading, shared reading, literacy notebooks, and text-based reading response exercises. All units feature “write like” assignments where students try their hands at writing like the narratives and informational reports they are reading.

Grade 4: Setting up the Literacy Studio: An Upper Elementary Investigation

Grade 5: Reading, Writing, Whales & Wolves

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Elementary SchoolMicroCourses Grades 3, 4, & 5

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NOVEL STUDIES

Grade 3: The Stories Julian Tells Novel StudyIn this study, students read Ann Cameron’s The Stories Julian Tells, a novel told through a loose collection of engaging and interconnected stories. This book provides a unique and powerful introduction to the practices of close reading, writing, and discussion as students learn to work within and across chapters. Students tackle comprehension tasks and engage in small and large group discussions that scaffold writing tasks in which they write about Cameron’s text. “Write like” assignments ask students to try their hands at writing sentences and paragraphs that imitate the syntax, structures, and sounds of Cameron’s rich language and dialogue.

Grade 4: The Tiger Rising Novel StudyThis study is an introduction to the close reading of longer fiction. During this MicroCourse, students read Kate DiCamillo’s The Tiger Rising, track key information, complete comprehension tasks that require reading across the entire text, and take on interpretive assignments. The interpretive work requires students to engage in a series of text-based discussions (both small group and whole-class) and culminates in the writing of two text-based arguments.

Grade 5: M.C. Higgins, the Great Novel StudyThis unit positions students to do the important intellectual work of creating text-based arguments in response to a series of interpretive assignments about Virginia Hamilton’s novel M.C. Higgins, the Great. A ‘spiraling up’ of the work introduced in the grade 4 novel study, students learn to take clear interpretive positions and to craft compelling explanations in which they provide reasons and text-based evidence to support their claims.