How do you support upper-grade and middle school readers if they are new to the norms and culture of reading workshop, particularly if they may also have missed some foundational instruction in reading fiction and nonfiction? How do you do this in a way that builds a strong reading community and strong habits and routines? How do you approach all this if you are new to the teaching of reading workshop? The Up the Ladder Reading units offer a very good place to start.
The Up the Ladder Reading units aim to rub off summer rust, to get readers back into the swing of reading, and begin right away to move readers up levels of text complexity. The Up the Ladder Reading units—one for reading fiction and one for reading nonfiction—begin with the clear expectation that students are in charge of their own reading lives. Agency and independence are stressed across sessions. Students build essential skills such as fluency, envisioning, prediction, making deeper inferences, and finding main ideas.
While these units are ideal for use with students in intermediate grades, specific guidelines are offered in the online resources to help teachers adapt instruction for middle school readers. Each unit launches about a four-week stretch of time in your reading workshop, and also your entire year.
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