If you want to teach your reading curriculum through a series of in-depth genre units (if you want to implement genre study), here’s your planning mantra: Collect, Immerse, Teach, Notice, Define, Analyze.
In this post, I’ll summarize each of the six steps and explain how you can organize your lessons (all lessons, even the ones that aren’t genre-specific) logically across a unit. Here we go!
Six Steps to Genre Unit
- Collect Quality Texts: This part is all you, the teacher. When you begin planning your genre unit, collect a big ol’ stack of grade-level picture books from the genre (bring one of those plastic crates on wheels to the library…or a wheelbarrow). Read through the texts and select the ones that best fit your instructional goals, your student’s preferences and your time constraints.
- Immerse: Now, immerse your students in the genre. Engage in daily read alouds, and have students read examples of the genre during guided reading, independent reading, and literature study.
- Teach (General Reading Skills & Strategies): While students explore the genre, you teach the curriculum through mini lessons, conferences and guided reading lessons. Your lessons will feature all kinds of content–some of it will be genre specific, but most of it won’t be (see below).
- Notice: Toward the end of the unit, ask students what they noticed about the genre. Record their observations on your genre anchor chart (read about the anchor chart, and steps 4 & 5, in this post).
- Define: Use your list of characteristics to form a class definition. You can read about defining the genre here.
- Analyze (Analyze & Teach the Genre): Finish up the unit with mini lessons that put the spotlight on this genre in particular. In step 4 you are teaching your regular reading curriculum (examples: text structure, word solving, making inferences). Now you’re asking students to analyze this genre in particular (example: What differentiates autobiography from memoir? How can you tell what is fact and what is fiction when reading historical fiction?).
What Do I Teach During My Mini Lessons?
It depends on where you are in your genre unit. You’ll spend the first 1/3-2/3 of the unit teaching your regular curriculum, while reading the genre throughout workshop. Then, you’ll define the genre and teach a few genre-specific lessons.
So in the above graphic, the pink and dark green squares represent most of your lessons. These lessons will be about skills that pertain to all reading (like word solving, making inferences, etc) and skills that pertain to broad genre categories like fiction or nonfiction (example: plot for fiction, text structure for nonfiction).
Toward the end of the unit you take a day to define the genre as a class. Then, you finish up with a few genre-specific lessons (light green).
You can preview a collection of ready-made genre units by downloading this free Genre Study Catalogue.
What do you think? Could you see yourself organizing your curriculum like this? I love how each unit allows for automatic spiral review while you’re in the first part of the unit (pink & dark green lessons in the image above).
