A Curricular Plan for the Reading Workshop
By Lucy Calkins and Colleagues from TCRWP
Grade 3 Unit Map
Unit #1: Building a Reading Life
Time: September
Overview
The biggest work, the work that unites and underlies everything you will do as a teacher of reading in
this upcoming year, is to help all your children to become avid, powerful readers. In this unit, students
will learn to take ownership of their own reading life. They will acquire a deep understanding of
themselves as readers and create a social life that revolves around shared books.
Part One: Making Reading Lives
 Creating reading resolutions
 Finding just-right books
 Reading faster, stronger, longer
 Awakening ourselves to text
Part Two: Making Texts Matter
 Holding tight to meaning
 Building relationships with books
 Creating buzz about books
 Choosing texts that matter
Part Three: Bringing Together Reading Lives, Texts that Matter, and Partners
 Reading interdependently
 Working effectively with a partner to talk about books
During this unit:
(See pgs. 4-16 of A Curricular Plan for the Reading Workshop )
 Get to know readers by spending time individually with each student, using a variety of
assessment strategies to get to know readers
 Address “summer slide” by providing extra small group instruction for students not meeting
grade level expectations
 Establish routines and expectations for the way workshop operates, including a year-long plan
for conferring regularly with all students
 Set up expectations and systems for tracking reading stamina and volume and responding to
text (i.e. reading logs, reading notebooks)
 Establish a system for data collection and record keeping
Stage 1 – Common Core State Standards and Indicators– What must students know and be able to do?
Reading Literature:
Key Ideas and Details
 3.RL.01 Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to
the text as a basis for the answers.
 3.RL.02 Recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine
the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the
text.
Craft and Structure
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3CS.04 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing
literal from nonliteral language.
Reading Foundational Skills:
 3.RF.03 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.
 3.RF.04 Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension
Speaking and Listening:
Comprehension and Collaboration:
 Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacherled) with diverse partners on grade 4 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing
their own clearly (See 3.SL.1)
Essential Questions for Students
Guiding Questions for Teachers
Who am I as a reader, and how am I unique
among other readers?
How can I create an active learning community that
awakens students to texts and enables them to
develop rich personal reading lives?
How can I make myself a better reader?
How can I inspire readers to build relationships with
books, choose texts that matter, and develop
meaningful knowledge?
How can I help students foster relationships with one
another and hold conversations that will comb
through their reading lives?
Stage 2– Common Assessment – What is the evidence of understanding?
Universal Screens
Formative Assessment Strategies
Benchmark Assessments
DSA
DRP
Fall Comprehension Assessment??
Independent Reading Assessment??
Check with TC about reading assessments for
each unit??
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Engagement and Independence
Reading logs
Stop and jot during read aloud
Turn and talk
Reading Assessment for Independent Reading Books
Common Assessment
Stage 3 – Instruction – What learning experiences will lead to understanding?
Skills:
Key Terms/Vocabulary
Reading for fluency and stamina
Monitoring for meaning
Retelling
Comprehension
Context clues
Engagement
Genre
Infer
Main idea
Monitoring
Narrative
Narrator
Organization
Pace
Partnerships
Purpose for reading
Stamina
Summarize
Reader’s notebook
Reflect
Synonym
Visualizing
One Possible Sequence of Teaching Points
(A Note To Teachers: Please remember that this one possible sequence of teaching points. Based on
the students in your class, you may decide to spend more time on some things and not others. This is a
guide to help you make decisions based on the learners in front of you. We have reworded some of
Lucy Calkins’ language to reflect our “what, by, why” structure to help clarify the skills and strategies.)
Part One: Making Reading Lives
How can I create an active learning community that awakens students to texts and enables them to
develop rich personal reading lives?
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Readers build reading lives by stopping to reflect. We ask ourselves “When was reading the pits
for me?” and “When was it the best it can be?” This helps us learn how to change our reading
lives for the better.
Readers set reading goals by sometimes stopping and saying, “From today on, I’m going to…”
and then we name our hope or promise. This can change how we read in the future. (See pg. 24
in Building a Reading Life)
Reading researchers have found that all of us need tons and tons of ‘high success’ reading in
order to grow as readers. We need tons of time to read when we are not fussing over hard
words, when we are not stopping and starting and stopping again, when we don’t need to
furrow our foreheads. We need lots of mind-on-the story reading. Today I want to teach you to
recognize the kinds of books that are at our own personal level- ones we can read smoothly,
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with accuracy and comprehension.
Readers take off the brakes as we read, sometimes picking up our reading pace a bit, so we can
take in both the details and the whole of what we are reading. (Pgs. 54-67 in Building a Reading
Life)
Readers learn to pay attention while reading, rather than reading quickly as if on autopilot, so
that the words matter. (Pgs. 68-81 in Building a Reading Life)
Part Two: Making Texts Matter
How can I create an active learning community that awakens students to texts and enables them to
develop rich personal reading lives?
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Readers sometimes pause when we become confused in the text we’re reading. When that
happens, we say “Huh?” and either reread or pay closer attention to the details in order to help
ourselves understand. (Pgs. 84-101 in Building a Reading Life)
Readers choose what our relationship toward books will be. We can be a curmudgeon toward
books, saying “I don’t feel like reading this.” or we can let books matter to us, reading them like
they’re gold, “I can’t wait to read today!” We do this by choosing books that interest us and
that we can read with ease. (Pgs. 102-111 in Building a Reading Life)
Strong readers create a buzz about books we love. Readers recommend books by
summarizing, reading an excerpt, and telling why this book mattered to them. We do this to
expose each other to many books and to share our passion. (Pgs. 112-125 in Building a Reading
Life)
Readers build their reading lives by having a stack of books that can turn us into the readers we
want to be. We need systems that can help us find those books. (Pgs. 126-139 in Building a
Reading Life)
Readers are like monster tractors, that climb over the hurdle of the hard word, and read on,
never taking a detour from the trail of the story. We read forward, asking ourselves, “What
might this mean?” or we think of a synonym for the word. (Pgs. 140-163 in Building a Reading
Life)
Part Three: Bringing together Reading Lives, Texts that Matter, and Partners
How can I help students foster relationships with one another and hold conversations that will comb
through their reading lives?
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
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Readers build reading partnerships, getting to know each other in a special way- as readers. We
do this by paying attention to each other’s reading histories, reading interests and reading
hopes. This is important because we can become positive influences in each other’s reading
lives. (Pgs. 166-181 in Building a Reading Life)
You know what readers? I’m realizing now that reading a book is a lot like going to the moviesa lot of the fun part comes after reading time is over, when you get to talk about what you’ve
read. (Pgs. 182-193 in Building a Reading Life)
Readers retell our books as a way to lay the story out for others and for ourselves so we can talk
and think it over. We do this by taking big steps through the timeline of events, telling only the
important ones. This is important because the process of retelling and rethinking keeps the
whole story primed in our minds. (Pgs. 194-207 in Building a Reading Life)
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When we are reading and also when we are listening to other readers’ ideas, we need to make
sure that we’re listening with our minds and hearts open. We don’t want to listen like
curmudgeons. We want to listen reminding ourselves that there are deeply brilliant ideas about
to be made, ones that just need a little listening to grow.
Resources:
Calkins, Lucy and Colleagues. 2011. A Curricular Plan for the Reading Workshop Grade 3. Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann.
Calkins, Lucy and Kathleen Tolan. 2010. Building a Reading Life: Stamina, Fluency and Engagement.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Mentor Texts
Determined by personal preference
Check with third grade to determine class favorites
Websites and Technology
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