Units of Study for Reading: Mystery - Foundational Skills in Disguise with Trade Pack, 1st edition

Mysteries are the perfect vehicle for teaching foundational skills that lie at the heart of engaged reading. Students leap at the chance to do the work required to “get” the mystery, following ideas across their texts, seeing cause-and-effect relationships, and predicting outcomes. And, of course, mysteries naturally push kids to infer—to notice clues and to wonder more about them; to consider how part of one chapter relates back to what was learned in an earlier chapter; and to wonder when characters are really telling the truth.

In this unit, students will:

• Learn to read closely to catch key details,
• Learn to think back over and accumulate details, developing hunches, suspicions, predictions
• Become more skilled at gathering information from texts by rereading and annotating
• Transfer what they learn about mysteries to other types of fiction

This unit is intended to follow Building a Reading Life in the Units of Study series and to reinforce many of the key lessons on foundational skills taught in that unit. It can, however, also come later in the year. Its clear instructional arc will support and engage a wide range of learners.

The Mystery Trade Pack includes age-appropriate trade books that are used in the units to model effective writing techniques, encourage students to read as writers, and provide background knowledge.

• The Absent by Ron Roy
• The Diamond Mystery by Martin Widmark

About the Four Additional Units

The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and Heinemann are proud to announce the release of four additional book-length units of study, each addressing an especially key topic from the Units of Study If...,Then… books.

These new book-length units have been written to fit tongue and groove into the original Units of Study, yet each can also work as a self-contained stand-alone unit, offering you a chance to try on the experience of teaching with the Units before moving to the complete series.