About the Units of Study Summer School Curriculum
These standards-based—and joyful—summer school units review key topics from the previous grade level Units of Study to prepare kids for the year ahead. These units offer the newest researched-based methods for teaching phonemic awareness, assessment-based decoding, vocabulary, knowledge generation, argument, and more. Designed specifically for teachers with a background in workshop teaching, these units will help teachers bring the responsive tools and methods they use all year long into their summer school classrooms.
This subscription is an all-digital resource that includes videotaped minilessons to help teachers launch powerful reading and writing workshops that will inspire students’ joy and confidence while accelerating their growth. Teachers may choose to use the minilesson videos to teach directly, or as professional learning to guide their own teaching of minilessons.
See the “Subscription Terms and Conditions” section on this webpage for more information.
Units Included in this Grade-Level Sequence
The following are the reading/phonics and writing units that comprise this subscription:
Using Phonics and Fluency to Bring Characters to Life (27 Student Videos)
- This unit focuses on foundational work and supports students in paying attention to characters, using their phonics knowledge to decode, and monitor for meaning. You’ll focus on helping students get to know characters’ feelings and traits, and to use that information to make informed predictions about what comes next in the story as well as to confirm or revise those predictions. You’ll also support students in working on fluency. You’ll support students in working to monitor and self-correct, helping them to decode the longer words they are encountering and inviting them to look at prefixes and suffixes to help with vocabulary and meaning.
Writing Series Fiction (24 Student Videos)
- Students will learn to develop characters by adding distinctive details that reoccur in every book of their series, by thinking about their character’s traits and finding ways to show those through actions and dialogue. They’ll give their character a series of problem adventures. Throughout this work, students are guided to use phonics and knowledge of conventions on the run as they engage in first draft writing, and to reread their writing, monitoring for sense, revising for clarity, and making their writing more readable.
Building Blocks: High Frequency Words & Phonological Awareness
3 PA units with 10 videos each (includes 2 units with review of rising grade 2 and 1 unit with new content), 20 HFW videos
- Each summer school day for rising third graders begins with a lively, quick cumulative phonics review that uses highly engaging activities to help kids consolidate their knowledge of phonics. This work includes Making Words (also called Word Ladders), an activity that can be done again and again in ways that reinforce other phonics work. Kids work with words, breaking them down, writing them, using familiar word parts to do so. They revisit endings (especially n blends), vowel teams such as igh, ie, ow, ou, ew, ue, au, aw, and R-controlled vowels, and also work with prefixes and suffixes. The goal for this work is to support review and automaticity with the phonics that children are taught during kindergarten and first grade.
For more information about the Units of Study Summer School curriculum, visit UnitsofStudy.com/SummerSchool.
