Units of Study in Writing, 2024, Grade 2 Bundle with Trade Pack

The Units of Study in Writing series is designed to support students’ abilities to be strategic, metacognitive writers. Within and across grades, the units fit tongue-and-groove alongside each other. Together, they help students consolidate and use what they have learned to meet and exceed world-class standards for each grade. 

What makes the Units of Study particularly magical is the way that one day’s teaching links to the next. Skills and concepts introduced in one unit are revisited and strengthened, both within a grade level and across grade levels. The Learning Progressions that undergird the Units of Study in Writing are cohesively organized to help teachers see ways to teach toward big goals, offering a clear map of what writing development looks like, grade by grade and level by level.

About the new Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grade 2

The Units of Study in Writing for Grade 2 is designed to help your second graders take all of the writing skills in their possession to the next level, and to prepare them with the skills they’ll need to be successful in third grade and beyond. In Unit 1, Making Small Moments Big, you’ll draw on the first-grade notion that stories can be about small, every day, beautifully mundane moments—but now, you’ll offer a new angle. You’ll nudge students to consider not only times in their lives, but also the feelings they felt, to find moments that matter. Unit 2, Chapter Books: Writing Nonfiction from the Heart, emphasizes writing nonfiction from the heart on topics that matter deeply to your students while reminding students that nonfiction can be more than just listing facts. In Unit 3, Finding Awesome Everywhere: Celebrating through Opinion Writing, you’ll teach writers to become the kinds of people who pay particular attention to the awesome parts of life, encouraging students to write more thoughtfully about their lives, the things they love, and the books they read. The second-grade writing workshop concludes with Unit 4, Writing Research-Based Nonfiction, in which you’ll invite your kids to become researchers, learning through study and note-taking, through gathering facts and growing ideas about a topic. They’ll be asked to write numerous chapter books (sometimes on the same topic) using different organizing structures. By the end of this writing workshop, students will have the confidence and motivation necessary to continue writing creatively over the summer and into third grade.

Grade 2 Unit Titles

• Making Small Moments Big (Unit 1)
• Chapter Books: Writing Nonfiction from the Heart (Unit 2)
• Finding Awesome Everywhere: Celebrating through Opinion Writing (Unit 3)
• Writing Research-Based Nonfiction (Unit 4)

About the Series

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 incorporate 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. The new Units of Study will do more to empower, revitalize, and strengthen teachers than ever before—and that will build even stronger communities of learning to set all kids on trajectories of growth. 

For more information about the Units of Study for Teaching Writing, visit UnitsofStudy.com/K-2Writing.