Reading Nonfiction Text Sets: Plants and Their Adaptations Essential Questions:
z How do plants’ adaptations help them to survive and thrive in their habitats? z How can we build knowledge by reading across nonfiction texts in a text set?
This unit has three major goals. The first goal is to support students in deepening their nonfiction research skills, equipping them with the skills they need to research any nonfiction topic well. A second goal is for students to learn a tremendous amount about plants and plant adaptations, as well as different plant subtopics. And a third goal is for students to strengthen their foundational reading skills, particularly around vocabulary and reading with fluency. Let’s turn to the topic of deepening nonfiction research skills first. Across students’ lives, they’ll regularly be asked to research new topics. Across this unit, you’ll teach them how to do this research well, arming them with a set of skills they can draw on whenever they want to learn about a new topic. You’ll especially emphasize two transferable skills: orienting to texts in order to anticipate both the content and the structure of the text; and determining main ideas and key details the author teaches. As you do this work, you’ll spotlight research-based comprehension strategies. You’ll emphasize the importance of activating prior knowledge before reading, monitoring for comprehension, asking and answering questions, attending to main ideas, and summarizing the text. As students research, you’ll teach them about text sets, including the importance of starting their research by reading texts that overview the big ideas and important vocabulary of a topic. They’ll also learn to synthesize information from across several texts on a topic and to learn from multimodal texts. All this research centers the topic of plants and plant adaptations, which is part of the Next Generation Science Standards ® (NGSS ® ) for Grade 3. Across the unit, and the related read-aloud and vocabulary extensions, you’ll support students in building a deep knowledge base about this topic. You’ll teach them how to activate their knowledge about a topic, how to integrate their new learning into their existing knowledge base, and how to revise their knowledge base when necessary. Through this whole-class shared study of plants and plant adaptations, students will learn about and experience nonfiction reading strategies that can be useful in any inquiry. They will transfer those strategies to the work they do in small research groups, which again will be exploring topics related to plants. In the online resources, we’ve provided suggested topics and text sets for each group. Students will study these focal topics for one bend and then swap to another topic. Whenever possible, we advise that students move from one topic to another topic that has some relationship with the first, so that they can apply concepts and re-use new vocabulary. For instance, stu- dents who research how plants grow in Bend I might then research farming and gardening in Bend II. Students who research rainforest plants in Bend I might next study ocean and wetland plants. Since all of these topics are related to the whole-class study, students will all be able to draw on the knowledge and vocabulary they are learning from the whole-class work. Finally, through this work, you’ll spotlight a few foundational reading skills. You’ll support work with vocabulary, helping students to strengthen their word consciousness, as well as teaching them how to use context clues and their knowledge of morphol- ogy to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words. You’ll also spotlight fluency, teaching students to read with attention to phrasing and punctuation. Students will draw on this work as part of the end-of-unit celebration, as they choose an important text excerpt they’ve studied and prepare an engaging, fluent read-aloud of that excerpt for their peers. Each bend of each unit describes the particular research foundation which is most relevant to the upcoming instruction, and additional research citations are woven across the unit. A more complete research basis is provided in The Guide to the Reading Workshop .
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Unit 2 • Reading Nonfiction Text Sets: Plants and Their Adaptations
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