Teach Units, Not Stories – Creating Life Long Learners

I’ve been noticing that a lot of teachers get bogged down by individual stories in the Open Court units and miss the big ideas of the units.

While you do need to teach the stories in the anthology and will need to scaffold vocabulary just enough to give access to English Language Learners, the individual stories are almost irrelevant except as they relate to the big ideas of the unit. So while the 2nd grade Kindness unit has two stories about whales and I show a two minute clip about whales so students understand what they are, how they move, and how they sound, this is not a unit about whales. Whales are in the stories as examples of humans being kind to animals and on a broader level how you show kindness to people who are helpless (animals being an example).

By relating stories to the big ideas of the unit, you can also relate those same ideas to other curricular areas thereby increasing student comprehension and knowledge across the curriculum.

So how do you focus on units?

You need to sit down before starting each unit and figure out what are the big concepts of the unit that you want to teach. The manual makes several suggestions for each story and offers sample questions, you won’t be able to teach all of these. Choose the ones that relate to your state standards, the ones that make the most sense to you, the ones that seem most relevant. I like to do this with my grade level as it’s helpful to bounce ideas off of other people. If you have a theme, then suddenly you have a purpose for why you’re reading what you’re doing.

I’ll offer a few examples…

In the first grade folktales unit, we decided to focus on elements of folktales. In addition to the anthology, I exposed the students to as many folktales as I could, each time relating them to folktale elements such as things happening in 3’s, heroes and villains, morals, etc… When students wrote their own folktale, naturally it had these elements.

While you certainly teach about camouflage in the second grade “Look Again” unit, the meaning you are teaching is much deeper if you use camouflage as an example animal adaptations and adaptations in general. Then you can relate adaptation to social studies and even getting along with one another on the play ground.

The Cooperation and Competition unit could offer much more to students than just understanding what “cooperation” and “competition.” Why not focus on rules for playing games, running for office etc. and then relating cooperation and competition to those rules?

My links to the theme are not “the right answer.” You need to choose how you’re going to approach each them and then weave that thread throughout the unit. When you do this, other components of the program such as the Concept/Question Board and handing-off discussions are going to be far more meaningful because you’re no longer talking about just the characters in a particular story. You now have a broader theme that you can relate that story to.