How to Plan a Unit for Your ELA Classroom

If you’ve ever looked over your standards for the year and wondered how you will ever get through them all, you’re far from alone. It can be really overwhelming to try to form units or create a plan for tackling all the skills students need to know. To take some guesswork out of planning a unit, I want to walk you through my process for planning and give you a unit plan example. 

Planning a Unit

Whether you’re putting together a fiction unit or crafting the perfect argumentative writing unit, you’ll need a plan for how you’re going to teach each skill and in what order. Here’s my step-by-step unit planning process.

#1 Look at Your Standards and Create a Checklist

You know that entire list of standards you have to teach? Start first by breaking it apart. You’ll want to pull out the standards that correspond to the particular unit you are planning. For example, a fiction unit would need all the standards on plot, character development, etc. You may also want to add in some complementary standards, like grammar and writing.

Next, turn the standards you’ve identified into a checklist. It can be as simple as copying and pasting the standard onto a Google Doc. However, you’ll want to make sure you understand the standards as well before you move to the next step.

#2 Choose a Mentor Text or Writing Exemplars

Next, you need to choose your mentor texts. These mentor texts or writing exemplars will serve as a guide to show students the standards in action. You’ll work through these texts or exemplars with your students, and the text you choose will be the cornerstone of your lessons for this unit. 

When planning a reading unit, you can choose a book or small pieces of text as your guide. You’ll read and analyze this text as a demonstration of the skill. For example, pulling a passage that shows point of view or the impact of setting on a story.

If you are planning a unit for writing, you’ll want to use writing samples. You can either source these or create them yourself. Once again, you’ll pull these samples to showcase specific writing skills like counterarguments or providing evidence.

#3 Create a Focus for Each Day

Once you have the standards organized and the texts chosen, you can start really planning the unit. This is where you’ll really dig in and do the bulk of your unit mapping so you know exactly what you are teaching each day.

As you plan, go day by day and identify the standard you’ll focus on, the text or exemplar you’ll use, the activity you’ll use for practice, and if students will be doing any sort of book club activity. You’ll want to refer back to your checklist here. As you plan each day and start spreading out your standards, check them off the list to make sure you cover them all. 

Eventually, you’ll want to dig in even deeper by creating your mini-lessons, pulling out the passages you’ll need, creating materials, and more.

Example of a Reading Unit

I want to give you a specific example of what planning a unit looks like for me. For this unit plan example, let’s look at my realistic fiction unit, which has 18 lessons.

For this unit, I chose three mentor texts: Ghost by Jason Reynolds for sixth grade, Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick for seventh grade, and The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton for eighth grade. These three books offer many opportunities for students to think critically and deeply about the standards for their grade level.

Before the unit, I made a checklist of the standards I needed to cover. Then, I pulled out a sheet of paper and began scattering these standards across the unit in a way that makes sense, such as starting with standards that would typically come up at the beginning of a novel (like setting). I also paired some standards together that could be taught or applied in the same lesson.

Next, I read through each of the books and identified parts of the chapter that would tie together with the standards. While I read, sometimes I will shift the standards as needed if there isn’t an applicable passage.

Lastly, I put the whole unit together! I identify additional activities that will pair together with what students are learning and create those materials.

Example of a Writing Unit

My narrative writing unit uses the same three mentor texts as the realistic fiction unit and has 15 lessons. The narrative and realistic fiction unit were designed to work together, so you can easily bring together reading and writing. 

Once again, I identified the standards needed for planning this unit ahead of time. Then, I laid them out in an order that makes sense, like teaching elements of narrative writing, then moving to plot, and so on.

Next, I identified parts of the mentor texts that could be used as examples for each lesson. I like to give students a chance to identify some examples as they read as well, but it can be a challenge when they are searching through a whole chapter. So, come prepared with some parts of the texts you can direct students to.

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