Welcome to the Unit Essential Question
Your read-aloud work also supports within-text and cross-text synthesis. You continually teach students to think about how the part they are hearing connects back to earlier parts in the text or connects to central ideas about the topic as a whole. This work helps students to deepen their knowledge about plants and their adaptations. This unit places particular emphasis on supporting close reading. You’ll teach students to read complex texts closely and independently and to answer text-based questions that deepen their understanding of that text. These strategies will equip students to tackle complex texts with more skill, both when researching their own topics and on high-stakes assessments. Talking and Writing About Reading These read-aloud plans build on the talk structures that you introduced in Unit 1. You’ll continue to ask students to respond to all-calls and to turn and talk regularly in partnerships. You’ll also place an emphasis on extended, whole-class conversa- tions. You’ll lean on a Think-Pair-Share structure to help students first think independently about a question, then discuss the question in partnerships, and then finally share their thinking as a whole class. This structure will help you boost participation during whole-class conversations. To help students talk more skillfully about content, you’ll equip them with sentence starters, channeling them to use those first in their talk. At times, you’ll also ask students to write long in response to a question you pose, using the academic language they are developing. We’ve suggested times you can collect these responses as a form of formative assessment. Students will talk in ways that are especially text-based. To support this work, you’ll regularly project sections of the text for kids to discuss. At times, you’ll make text excerpts available for students to cite as they talk. Students will use sketching and labeling as a way to write about their reading. You’ll also model how to take notes that syn- thesize big ideas about a topic. This sets kids up for the note-taking they’ll do during reading workshop. Knowledge-Building Goals Across this unit, your read-aloud and close reading time will help students build critical knowledge about plants, especially the different ways plants adapt to their environments to help them survive and thrive across their life cycles. Students will learn that plants are living organisms that cover major parts of the world. All plants have a few things in common. They have roots, stems, and leaves. They require air, water, and nutrients in order to survive. They cannot move on their own, so they require the help of other animals, insects, and the wind to move their seeds and pollen to new locations. Many plants grow from seeds, and most plants flower. Around the world, plants have evolved to have a variety of fascinating adaptations that help them to survive in their unique habitats. For instance, in arid environments, plants like cacti have developed thick, waxy skins to minimize water loss. A cac- tus’s spines protect it from predators that may otherwise want to eat it. Cacti also have deep root systems that allow them to reach underground water sources. Together these adaptations help cacti to survive in harsh, dry conditions. Of course, cacti are just one example of the ways plants have adapted to their environments. Plant adaptations tend to fall into a few different categories, which students will explore across your read-alouds. Some adap- tations help plants to access water or conserve the water they manage to collect. Some adaptations help plants to regulate their temperature, either reducing heat loss or preventing overheating. Other adaptations help plants to acquire nutrients; these adaptations are especially critical in nutrient-poor environments, such as sandy soils. Additional adaptations help plants attract pollinators or disperse their seeds. Still more adaptations help plants to defend themselves from predators. All these adaptations result in plants that look and function in very different ways. When adaptations are successful and help plants to survive in their environments, plants will pass these adaptations down to future generations. As the unit wraps up, students will develop more in-depth knowledge about two particular plants: bristlecone pine trees, includ- ing the Methuselah tree, and Coast Redwoods. These plants have many unique adaptations that allow them to survive–and thrive–for long periods of time.
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? Read-Aloud and Close Reading Texts Across the unit, you’ll share six texts with students. You’ll use these texts across read-aloud and close reading sessions. You’ll also incorporate opportunities for whole-class conversations and for culminating activities.
The Forest Keeper: The True Story of Jadav Payeng by Rina Singh Plants in Different Habitats by Bobbie Kalman Pretty Sneaky: The Tricky Ways Plants Survive by Etta Kaner “The Methuselah Tree: Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest” by Joan Bransfield Graham “The Amazing Methuselah Tree” by Lauren Gould Redwoods by Jason Chin
This unit relies on you reading aloud the books, poem, and article that are supported through this resource. These plans deeply support the instruction that occurs during your minilessons and will help you demonstrate the work you hope your students will be doing with their independent books. They also support students as they build essential content knowledge that will allow them to more deeply understand their own topics. However, if you want to invent your own read-aloud instruction in response to your students, know that it is less important that you closely follow these plans than that you read aloud the texts and sections that are referenced in the minilessons. If you do want to be guided by these plans, know that the bolded sections offer sufficient guidance so you can skip the detailed examples of how instruction might look. Higher-Level Comprehension This read-aloud unit begins with a biography, which provides the opportunity for students to use the fiction reading skills they honed in Unit 1 in a different context. Students get to know the subject of the biography, including their traits and feelings, study the challenges they face, and learn about what they do to overcome those challenges. Students also consider life lessons they can learn from the text. When you shift to reading expository nonfiction, you begin by teaching students how to orient to topics and texts. Students learn to preview texts, considering what the text will teach and how it will teach that information. As they read, they pause regularly to consider the main ideas they are learning, drawing on main idea strategies that you support explicitly during minilessons in the reading unit. Students learn to attend to the structure of a text and organize their summaries in the same way, so that if a text teaches what happens in sequence, their summary follows that same structure. Along the way, you’ll teach kids how to answer text-dependent questions, drawing explicitly on evidence from the text to support their thinking. You’ll also build students’ bank of vocabulary strategies, so that when they encounter unfamiliar words, they know how to determine the meaning by finding a definition, making inferences based on context, or using knowledge of morphology.
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GRADE 3 • Unit 2 • Let’s Gather
WELCOME TO THE UNIT
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