2.2. BASES TEÓRICAS
2.2.6. Tipos de merchandising
2.2.6.3. Merchandising de seducción
A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE3, 2011–2012 1 © 2011 by Lucy Calkins. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH.
SEPTEMBER UNIT1: Launching the Writing Workshop
OCTOBER UNIT2: Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing
NOVEMBER UNIT3: Realistic Fiction
DECEMBER UNIT4: Opinion Writing: Persuasive Reviews and Speeches/Letters
JANUARY UNIT5: Informational Writing
FEBRUARY/MARCH UNIT6: Poetry
MARCH/APRIL UNIT7: Genre Studies
MAY UNIT8: Informational Writing: Reading, Research, and Writing in the Content Areas
JUNE UNIT9: Revision
T
his curricular calendar details the Reading and Writing Project’s proposal for a third-grade writing curriculum aligned with the Common Core State Stan- dards. It has been extensively revised from the 2010–2011 version and will be revised again in the spring of 2012 to reflect the new learning we continue to pursue. Always, the Reading and Writing Project’s curricular calendars outline, for each K–8 grade, a yearlong course of study that is part of a spiral curriculum. Fashioned withinput from hundreds of teachers, coaches, and principals, this curriculum stands on three decades of work in thousands of schools and especially on the shoulders of
Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3–5(Heinemann, 2006), a series of books that capture the minilessons that Lucy Calkins and her coauthors presented while teaching many of these units of study.
This curriculum responds directly to the requirements spelled out in the new Common Core State Standards for third grade. It is also based on the New York State ELA exam and standards; if you teach in a different state, you will need to adjust this sequence of work according to your state’s assessments.
Made up of units of study that tend to be a month in duration, the third-grade cur- riculum calendar guides you through instruction in narrative, argument, informa- tional, and poetic writing that spirals through students’ total school experience. This instruction enables students to work in each of these fundamental modes with increasing sophistication and with decreasing reliance on scaffolds. For example, first graders write Small Moment stories by recalling an event and retelling it “across their fingers,” whereas third graders plot narratives using the graphic organizer of a time- line or a story mountain, revising the narratives so that beginnings and endings relate to what the story is really about. In a similar manner, from kindergarten through eighth grade, students become progressively more capable at writing opinion (or argument) texts. In first grade, for example, children make and substantiate claims in persuasive letters. By third grade, they learn to use expository structures in order to persuade. By fifth grade, students analyze informational texts to understand conflict- ing points of view and write argument essays in which they take a stand, drawing on evidence from research. Because the units of study are designed to build on one another, a teacher at any grade level can always consult the calendar for preceding and following grades for ways to support writers who especially struggle and those who especially need enrichment. This sometimes takes a bit of detective work, because units in, say, writing informational texts will not always bear the same title (they might be called all-about books at one grade and research reports at another), nor will these units necessarily be presented at a consistent time during the year.
While these curricular calendars support units that vary according to grade level, allowing students to work with increasing sophistication and independence over time, it is also true that all of the units aim to teach writers to write with increasing skill. Eudora Welty once said, “Poetry is the school I went to in order to learn to write prose,” and indeed, work in any particular genre can advance writing skills that are applicable across genres. Interestingly, the essential skills of great writers remain con- sistent whether the writer is seven, seventeen, or seventy years old. All of us try again and again to write with focus, detail, grace, structure, clarity, insight, honesty, and increasing control of conventions, and all of us do so by rehearsing, planning, study- ing exemplar texts, drafting, rereading, revising, reimagining, and editing.
There is nothing inevitable about this particular sequence of writing units of study. There are lots of other ways teachers couldunroll their writing curriculum. We lay out this one course of study for third graders because we believe it is a wise trajectory—
A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE3, 2011–2012 2 © 2011 by Lucy Calkins. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH.
one that stands on the shoulders of the work these children will have done in the pre- ceding year, that will enable them to meet the Common Core State Standards for third grade, and that sets them up for fourth grade. The other reason we lay out this single line of work is that the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project’s confer- ence days and coaching courses cannot provide close support for hundreds of differ- ent iterations of a writing curriculum. For the schools who are working closely with us, the Project’s writing-related conference days for third-grade teachers will support this particular line of work. Conference days usually precede the units of study by at least a week, if not by two weeks.
Many teachers make curricular maps based on these units, often following the for- mat put forth in Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design, and of course create minilessons that support these units. During the 2011–2012 school year, we will cre- ate a website where these and other resources can be shared. You can learn about this resource on our current website, www.readingandwritingproject.com. On this web- site, you will also find a bibliography of books that align to these units, most of which are available through Booksource.
Although we’re excited about this curricular calendar, we also know that nothing matters more in your teaching than your own personal investment in it. It is critical that you modify this plan in ways that give you a sense of ownership over your teach- ing and reflect what you know about your students. We encourage you, however, to work in sync with your third-grade colleagues (and perhaps second- and fourth-grade teachers as well) so that your teaching can benefit from the group’s cumulative knowl- edge. Ideally, this will mean that your grade-level meetings can be occasions for swap- ping minilessons, planning lessons in ways that inform your teaching, assessing and glorying in children’s work, and planning ways to respond to their needs.