Students will read books about families and make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections using those books. Students gain a deeper understanding of a text when they make authentic connections. Beginning with a read-aloud of Donald Crews' "Bigmama's", the instructor introduces and models the strategy of making connections. Read-alouds of "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats and "The Relatives Came" by Cynthia Rylant are followed by activities that help students learn to apply each type of text connection when responding to texts. After sharing and discussing connections in a Think-Pair-Share activity, students plan and write a piece describing a personal connection to one of the texts.

Getting children to use their imaginations when writing a story can sometimes be difficult. Drawing, however, can create a bridge between the ideas in a child's head and the blank piece of paper on the desk. In this lesson, students use factual information gathered from the Internet as the basis for creating a nonfiction story. Story elements, including setting, characters, problem, solution, and endings, are then used as a structure for assembling students' ideas into a fiction story.

Students hear one or more versions of The Gingerbread Man fairy tale. Students will then use illustrations from the text or those provided to sequence and retell the story. By using different versions, students compare the adventures of characters in familiar stories.

In this lesson, students are introduced to the idea of shapes through a read-aloud session with an appropriate book. They then use models to learn the names of shapes, work together and individually to locate shapes in their real-world environment, practice spelling out the names of shapes they locate, and reflect in writing on the process.

This resource provides information about using the classic children's book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown to illustrate the apparent movement of the moon across the sky at night. Suggestions for other books that are also helpful in teaching this concept are listed.

In this lesson, students practice describing a series of objects. They then take turns reaching into a bag to describe a hidden object, using only their sense of touch. After five clues are given, the other students try to guess what is in the bag, based on the descripive language used by their classmates. Finally, after the hidden object is guessed or revealed, students discuss additional ways to describe the object.

In this lesson, students take turns taking home a book bag that includes a stuffed toy, a book to read with their families, art supplies, a topic to discuss, and a journal to complete as a family. The students then return the bag the following day and share their entries with the class. After every student has taken the bag home, the journal is bound into a book for the classroom library. The goal is to invite parents to join their children in these literacy activities.

In this lesson, shared reading, guided reading, and small, cooperative-group instruction are used in a first-grade classroom to informally assess students' ability to demonstrate awareness of rhyme or other visual similarities in words. Students practice matching rhyming words using picture cards and apply phonological awareness—hearing rhyme—to analogy-based phonics (i.e., an ability to decode unknown words by identifying words with similar visual structure). Students use online resources to increase phonological awareness through rhyme.

In this lesson, the repetition, rhythm, and rhyme of Martin’s works provide opportunities for students to hear fluent reading modeled before participating in the readings through literary performance. The lesson provides students the chance to focus on their fluency and comprehension. The readers theater section of the lesson allows students to demonstrate these skills for an audience, while improving their literacy skills further.

In this lesson, students will read Laura Joffe Numeroff's 'If You Give a Mouse a Cookie' to combine word-skill work with prediction and sequencing practice. Students learn about cause-effect relationships during a shared reading of the book and then complete a cloze exercise that uses context and initial consonant clues. Students then create story circles that display the events of the story and use these circles to retell the story to a peer. Finally, the students compose their own stories featuring themselves in the role of the mouse.

In this unit, students will begin their inquiry by comparing fiction and nonfiction books about animals, using a Venn diagram. They will list things they want to know about animals on a chart. As a class, students will vote on an animal to research. They will revise their question list, and then research the animal using prompts from an online graphic organizer. After several sessions of research, students will revisit their original questions and evaluate the information they have gathered. Finally, students will revise and edit their work and prepare to present their findings to an authentic audience.

In this lesson, students will read part of a story and use details in the text, personal experience, and prior knowledge to predict the way the story will end. To support their predictions, the class discusses the plot elements of the book to the stopping point as well as experiences they have had with other books in the genre and in their own lives. Students individually create illustrations of the story’s ending that reflect their predictions and share these illustrations with the class before the entire book is read again. After the entire book has been read, students compare their endings to the ending in the original story.

Students listen to A Pocket for Corduroy and three other Corduroy stories and discuss the characters and plots. A letter to parents introduces a follow-up writing activity, in which a stuffed classroom "Corduroy" goes home with a different student each night. With parents' help, students write and illustrate a two- to three-sentence adventure story about Corduroy's stay with them, and share their stories with the class.

Rationale - Many students today come to school not knowing how to handle their emotions and conflicts. Through this project, students will gain knowledge and the tools they need throughout the school year.

Overview - Students explored different emotions through stories, videos, and experiences. They learned about rules and their importance for safety. Students learned about calming techniques such as: breathing, going to a safe place, and expressing emotions appropriately. Students designed and implemented a safe place in the classroom by making posters, sensory bottles, stress balls, and breathing pinwheels.

In this lesson, students engage in independent literacy centers to become proficient in completing activities about the stories they read. Although this lesson uses Seven Blind Mice as an example, the framework is adaptable to almost any text.

In this lesson, students will use a popular children's song that contains several high-frequency vocabulary words to assist in recognizing, reading, writing, and using the words in several contexts. Students sing the song repeatedly, while following along with a picture book that contains the lyrics and illustrations. They are then encouraged to participate in several hands-on activities to reinforce learning of the vocabulary words.

In this lesson, students will learn that building a snowman is one way to provide food for birds and animals during the winter. Students begin by listening to a book about snow. Students are then introduced to a K-W-L chart and discuss what they know about how animals find food in the winter. As students listen to Henrietta Bancroft's Animals in Winter, they listen for details about how some animals survive during the winter and record those details in the last column of the chart. To continue to build students' knowledge of the topic, they listen to additional fiction and nonfiction books and view a website about animals in winter. As a culminating activity, students use their charts to write and illustrate a story.

In this lesson, students choose their own reading material, respond to reading in a journal, and talk about their books daily in small groups. The teacher guides the work through structured prompts and by rotating participation with the groups. Students read at their individual levels, while heterogeneous grouping provides peer support. This lesson is a structured guideline for helping students learn to think about the books they read, and to ask questions about books shared by other students.

In this lesson, students write to friends and family asking them to send postcards. This activity provides motivation for writing and reading and provides a wonderful opportunity to learn about maps as students discover where their family members and friends live.

ABCya! presents its fifth children's storybook for the classroom. It's called Marvin Makes Music, an original work by Michelle Tocci. The story is about a frog that is sad because he cannot sing like his friends, until one day when he gets a new musical instrument. This is a great storybook to share with kids using an interactive whiteboard.

*This storybook has narration! Students can click the speaker button to have the story read to them.