Grade 2 Reading

Launching - Poetry

Unit Sketch

This is an introductory unit to develop reading workshop routines and structures. The second bend focuses on work decoding strategies using poetry to decode and creating original poems.

Enduring Understandings

Students will understand that...

  • Readers have strengths and weaknesses as readers and they need to nurture themselves as readers.

  • Making book choices should represent interest, level, and purpose.

  • Reading independently for increasing periods of time will help them grow as readers.

  • Readers persevere when text is challenging.

  • The look, sound, and words in a poem work together to create an image or feeling.

  • Poetry is a way to share an experience, an idea, or a feeling.

Skills

Students will be able to...

  • Choose just right books

  • Ask questions (does that make sense here?)

  • Read for increasing amounts of time

  • Decode unfamiliar words (chunking, beginning sounds, flipping vowel sounds, context clues, rereading/self-correcting, monitoring for meaning)

  • Explain thinking while reading

  • Talk about their books with teachers and peers

  • Read and discuss the "heart" of poems (what is the poem about?)

  • Compare poems on a similar topic

  • Read poetry with expression and fluency

Story Structure and Character Study

Unit Sketch

Readers will pay close attention to the characters in their books. Readers will focus on retelling their increasingly longer books requiring them to accumulate text across pages and determine what is important. This unit will also focus on thinking about what problems characters face, but also how their reactions to these problems play into the deeper meaning of the text. In order to support deeper understanding of their characters, readers will focus on stepping into the shoes of their character and reading with appropriate intonation and fluency based on the mood and tone of the text. Reading comprehension strategy (schema) was embedded into this unit last year as part of the PLT goal.

Enduring Understandings

Students will understand that...

  • Stories have common elements

  • Characters are an essential component of stories

  • Characters' behaviors and actions are in response to and/or effect events within a story

Skills

Students will be able to...

  • Retell the events in a story in order

  • Identify character feelings

  • Identify character traits and cite evidence from text

  • Make reasonable predictions

  • Activate schema through connections (text-to-self, text-to-text, text-to-world)

  • Explain / show their thinking throughout the story (sticky notes, partner-share, whole group share, conferring)

Reading Nonfiction: Becoming Experts

Unit Sketch

This unit is designed to teach second grade students the strategies for reading nonfiction texts. Students will focus their reading attention on growing knowledge as they pay attention to details and question nonfiction texts. The students will tackle both the tricky word work and vocabulary development of nonfiction reading. The students will develop as readers and will grow their knowledge across texts as they read topic sets of texts, comparing, contrasting and connecting information across texts.

Enduring Understandings

Students will understand that...

  • Texts have different structures and characteristics that help make the meaning of the text clearer.

  • Readers read to gain knowledge that helps them better understand themselves and their world.

  • Reading from multiple sources is effective to compare and contrast.

Skills

Students will be able to...

  • Use titles, illustrations, table of contents, chapter headings and indexes to locate information

  • Read for details and put them together to learn about a topic

  • Preview a nonfiction book to determine what the book will teach you

  • Utilize text features to figure out keywords

  • Use context clues to understand undefined keywords

  • Show what they have noticed, learned, and wondered about nonfiction topics they have read about

  • Make connections and compare/contrast information across nonfiction texts on the same topic

  • Discuss what they learned from a nonfiction text

Fairy Tales and Fables

Unit Sketch

Readers will read fairy tales and fables. They will apply comprehension strategies to understand, compare and contrast, determine importance of different kinds of fairy tales and fables. Readers will also work on improving their reading fluency and expression through readers theater.

Enduring Understandings

Students will understand that...

  • Stories teach us lessons that we can connect to and apply to our lives.

  • Stories are told from different points of view.

  • Author's intend for their books to be read in a certain way.

Skills

Students will be able to...

  • Identify the moral/lesson of various stories using text evidence

  • Compare and contrast different versions of fairytales and folktales

  • Use mood of characters to read with expression and appropriate phrasing while reading out loud

  • Recognize and use punctuation marks to read with appropriate expression

  • Make text to text, text to self, and text to world connections

  • Synthesize - based on all the events, what lesson can be inferred

Series Book Clubs

Unit Sketch

This unit is designed to support the reading of series books. Student’s comprehension is supported when they encounter familiar characters and places, book after book, throughout a series. Teaching students to think across books is also good practice to set them up for working longer, multi-chapter novels. It also builds young reader’s stamina. Students will draw on previously learned strategies, and develop new ones, to integrate what they know about a character (or characters) across a series. Students will use this information to understand, predict, and critique a story. They will react and pay attention to the important parts of the story and learn about how stories in series tend to go. They will pay attention to predictable structures that contain familiar, typical elements; these observations will help them predict and understand the characters better.

Enduring Understandings

Students will understand that...

  • Readers compare the way characters handle problems to other characters and other stories .

  • Readers grow ideas by looking across all series read by comparing and contrasting to push our thinking .

  • Readers infer about characters by thinking about what the characters are doing, saying, and thinking/feeling.

  • Readers pay attention to the challenges that characters face and how those challenges are resolved .

  • Reading club partners help push our thinking, especially with the characters in our books .

  • Readers can think across books in a series - noticing patterns, and predicting what will happen.

Skills

Students will be able to...

  • Make predictions based on schema, using all they know about the series

  • Make inferences about character traits and feelings

  • Ask questions about characters and

  • Compare and contrast elements within a series