We know that 3rd grade is a pivotal year where students transition from learning to read to reading to learn. It is important that we give students the necessary foundations starting in those earlier grades to ensure we are setting them up for success later on.

Today, we’re talking about how you can use your students’ favorite books to create evidence-based lesson plans that align with the Science of Reading so that students can receive instruction and solidify these necessary foundational skills.

This process requires 5 steps:

Step 1: Outline the Skills

We recommend that you start by outlining the skills that you want to include in your lessons.

We know that to align with the Science of Reading, we must include instruction on phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, and comprehension. Plus, we need to target both reading and writing as they are reciprocal processes.

Once you have the skills you need to target outlined, you can begin putting them into a progression.

Step 2: Build a Skill Progression

This is going to become your scope & sequence. When thinking about your skill progression, you want to think about how the skills stack on to one another.

We use these stairsteps to visualize how subskills in each core literacy component build upon each other.

For example, in our phonics progression, we start at the very beginning with consonants & short vowels. Then, we work all the way up through stable final syllables, making sure that the progression hits each of the concepts & syllable types that students need to know.

Depending on your students’ current skill levels, you may need to spend more time at different steps in these progressions.

Step 3: Consider Students’ Needs

This will help you understand how much time you should focus on each area.

Even though we need to be hitting on phonological awareness, phonics, vocab, fluency, and comprehension, that doesn’t mean we need to spend equal amounts of time on each of those areas.

Consider - what are the specific goals for your students? Do they need extra work in word recognition to support decoding? Do they need more support in vocabulary or comprehension?

Knowing what your students need and where they are having the most difficulty will allow you to target skills appropriately for their individual needs.

Step 4: Timing

When we put our lessons together, we like to break our books up into sections or individual lessons that create units. These will match the amount of time that we have with our students.

For example, if we know that we have 10 weeks with our students and we are going to be targeting each of these different components within that 10-week framework, we’re going to build our scope & sequence so that the stairsteps we talked about fit into the number of lessons we have.

You can see in this example, that we put together a 10-lesson framework for Dingoes at Dinnertime, one of our favorite Magic Tree House books.

Step 5: Pull Your Resources Together

We use a structure/template when building the lesson materials so that we can follow the same framework for all of our lessons. Within that framework, we’ll make sure that our content changes to align with the book we are using. This lets us build effective, evidence-based lessons but we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time.

If we already know what an effective cause-and-effect lesson should look like, we can use those same skills and strategies in our next lesson. We will just want to make sure that we are pulling in content for our next book.

Putting it all together -

You can grab our Lesson Planning Guides here to help you plan out your own SOR-aligned Authentic Literature Units!

If you want to grab all of our 2nd & 3rd-grade Authentic Literature Connections - you can find them all (including Dingoes at Dinnertime, Tonight on the Titanic, I Survived the Japanese Tsunami, and more) in our 5-Core Components of Literacy Activity Library here!

Learn More about the 5CCL Activity Library