April Unit Plan: Strengthening Executive Skills for Reading Comprehension
A mixable, matchable, pull-apartable, transferrable reading unit for any students.
I wasn’t planning to share this unit with you. In fact, I wasn’t planning to teach this unit. But this kind of bubbled up organically after I got excited about Jen Serravallo’s new podcast, and it has felt incredibly helpful — not just in English, but in all kinds of academic reading.
As I’ve listened to the first handful of podcast episodes, a recurrent thread is the absolute importance of executive skills for … everything. And there are, in fact, ways we can help students build these muscles.
So, that’s what this unit became about: helping students strengthen executive skills so that they are ready to tackle more challenging academic reading.
We used independent reading for this unit (we needed to practice this skills with low-risk self-chosen texts before moving on to more challenging texts). You could use these lessons in any reading unit — a whole-class novel, non-fiction articles, books clubs, etc. You could weave them one at a time into a whole bunch of units! This is very mixable, matchable, and pull-apartable.
Take a look at the unit plan, and then we’ll jump in:
Download a clickable copy of unit plan with materials by clicking the button below.