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.

Students will listen to a close reading of Harry the Dirty Dog  over the course of 3 days.  (The book is accessible via NC Kids Digital Library.   Personal copy or online versions can be used.) After each read aloud, students will have the opportunity to engage in The Engineering Design Process to create a maze using various materials to construct different ways for Harry to move through the maze .  Students will write to tell about their maze using sentence frames and an anchor chart for support.  Finally, students will present their maze and read their informational writing to reflect their knowledge of the Force and Motion standard, specifically the different ways objects move.  Maze creation and student informational writing should reflect multiple modes of movement per the NC Kindergarten Science Standards.

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.

In this lesson, students will gain knowledge about various birthday traditions from other countries around the world. The students will help the teacher make a chart of the most liked birthday traditions from the countries shared in the story.The students will also give similarities and differences they notice about birthday traditions around the world. This lesson was developed by LaToya Dawson as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.

In this kindergarten activity, students listen to My Teacher's Secret Life, discuss the content, and make predictions about what the teacher and their peers do when they are away from school. After charting both student and teacher activities, the teacher models writing a book of his or her life outside school.

This lesson is for grades PreK-K on literacy. At Home Learning Lessons are a partnership between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, PBS North Carolina, and the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. Each lesson contains a video instructional lesson, a PDF lesson plan with a transcript, and a PDF file of extension activities.

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 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.

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.

Read the book “Chicka, Chicka, Boom Boom” to your students. Discuss the letters that are in the book. Then have students work in pairs or groups to create a coconut tree that can hold as many alphabet magnets as possible. When finished students will count how many letters their tree could hold. They will also name as many letters as they can from their tree.

This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the Kindergarten English Language Arts content.Within the folder you will access Parent Guide PDFs in FIVE Languages: Arabic, English, Hindi, Spanish, and Vietnamese to help on-going communication with caregivers. 

This resource accompanies our Rethink Kindergarten ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning.  

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.

This lesson is for grades PreK-K on literacy. At Home Learning Lessons are a partnership between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, PBS North Carolina, and the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. Each lesson contains a video instructional lesson, a PDF lesson plan with a transcript, and a PDF file of extension activities.

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.