The NC Kids' Exploration Journals are a fun educational tool to help youth explore their communities and natural surroundings! Each journal contains: 18 multidisciplinary activities with guided prompts, 6 lined journal pages for recording observations and reflections, and 4 blank pages for individual creativity.

The digital versions of the journal are designed to be printed out for students either as individual activities or in its entirety so that they can explore their school yard, local park, or own backyard. Though designed for 1st - 5th-graders, older audiences may enjoy them too! They are also available in both English and Spanish languages.

While supplies last, hard copies of the journals are currently available for free to teachers by contacting karen.ipock@ncdcr.gov.

 Using Wonders text and their Reading/Writing Companion, students will learn why people immigrate to new places. Students will learn the difference in primary and secondary resources and why it is important to know where to get information. After reading texts from Wonders, students will use Google Earth to explore the places mentioned in the text and complete a Padlet discussing what they notice and wonder about the different locations. Students will be given an interactive note taking sheet on Jamboard to utilize as they read “The Castle on Hester Street”. Students will once again use Google Earth to explore Ellis Island as they begin to read “Next Stop, America!” and will complete a PearDeck text feature hunt. This will lead to a formative assessment where students will use FlipGrid to create a journal entry portraying themselves as an immigrant coming to America in the 1800’s.

Students will use Google Slides to publish a writing piece by typing their story, adding images to their slides, and creating links for readers to navigate their published book. This activity may take more than one class period.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade ELA.

This resource accompanies our Rethink 3rd Grade 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.  

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade English Language Arts. 

Help students explore an important moment of environmental activism in North Carolina with Save Our Sand Dunes by Hannah Bunn West and with Ann-Cabell Baum. This complementary learning guide to the book is designed to help educators guide young readers in discovering how Carolista Baum rallied a community and advocated for local and state leaders to preserve Jockey's Ridge.

What are the elements of narrative writing? How do authors describe people and places in their writing? From exposure to this lesson, students will gain a clear understanding of setting, characters, problem/solution, and plot. Each day students listen to a read-aloud of a story and are guided by discussions related to the focus story element for the lesson. After working collaboratively, students engage in independent activities such as completing a character map; a setting illustration; a problem/solution chart; a beginning, middle, and ending activity; and a story map. Activities can be modified for early readers by allowing them to work with partners.

This teacher's curriculum guide presents strategies for engaging readers before, during, and after reading the book. It also provides extension strategies to further students’ understanding through response to writing prompts.

After the teacher has read books about community helpers to students and the whole class has created a chart with columns (Community Helper; What the Helper Does; Effects on the Community), higher level students will work with the attached Job Postings to complete writing of job postings for particular community jobs. This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

In this activity, students write an informational piece of writing and read it to their audience on SeeSaw.

In this lesson, students get to flex their writing muscles as they use a variety of writing genres to create a zine of their own: letter writing, persuasive writing, narrative, acrostic poetry, comic writing, and biography/autobiography. Students choose a prominent figure from popular culture as the focus for a multigenre zine and then plan the project using the Facts–Questions–Interpretations method. Students then write in each of the listed genres about their chosen subjects, using a variety of ReadWriteThink.org tools. Finally, students design covers for their projects, and the teacher binds all the printed documents into individual zines.