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.

Please note this lesson has been aligned to math standards, as North Carolina does not currently have a STEM SCOS for K-5.

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 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.

In this lesson, students create a name tag using information about themselves. Each student's name tag, while being similar, will visually represent personal information. These name tags will help the teacher learn students' names, but they will also help the students get to know each other and practice a visual, contemporary literacy when they interpret glyphs made by others. Students learn that communication is symbolic on a very fundamental level in this lesson.

In this lesson, the teacher will show a variety of activities related to note writing that can be incorporated into the classroom throughout the year to promote authentic writing among students. Model note writing in context by taking advantage of opportunities that come up in the classroom both to read actual notes and to think aloud while writing them. Read books featuring notes, discuss why the notes were written, and copy the notes for classroom display. Enlist families in the fun by asking students to collect notes from home to share with the class.

Can you create a free standing castle using the given materials that will withstand the dragon’s fire?

In this lesson, students become familiar with the short /u/ sound as they listen to Taro Yashima’s Caldecott Honor-winning book, Umbrella. Prereading activities build vocabulary and comprehension skills, a read-aloud introduces students to the sounds of the story, and concluding exercises allow students to apply their understanding of phonic elements in other contexts.

In this unit, students will become aware of the importance of retelling and essential story elements through teacher modeling and progressive levels of independent work. Students demonstrate their understanding of stories through the use of online interactive graphic organizers and present story elements of an individual book through a book talk.

In this lesson, students will read Chrysanthemum to introduce the topic of names. Students make Name Bingo cards by writing the name of each classmate in a different square of a blank Bingo board. Next, students brainstorm personal questions designed to get to know one another. To play the game, the teacher randomly calls out a name, and students cover that name on their board with a marker. In this twist of the traditional bingo game, after each name is chosen, the student responds by answering one of the questions designed to help students learn more about one another.

In this lesson, students will use a weekly poem to explore meaning, sentence structure, rhyming words, sight words, vocabulary, and print concepts. After studying the poem, students are given a copy of the poem to illustrate and share their understanding. All of the poems explored are then compiled into a poetry portfolio for students to take home and share with their families. To further connect home to school, a family poetry project is suggested.

In this lesson, students make the connection that the words sung in a song are part of a book that can be read. They explore this connection through children's song storybooks and interactive websites. Students complete a project by writing new lyrics to a familiar song and creating illustrations related to the lyrics. During the lesson students engage in various levels of reading and writing activities.

This lesson is about using detective skills to be better nonfiction readers. Students will gather clues from the text to make assumptions and connections that will solve, and make meaning about the text. The students will use nonfiction text context clues, and pictures to realize that the author’s purpose is for them to find ALL the clues and make meaning of a topic.

In this lesson, students are read a series of two options and are asked to decide which options are more dangerous. They then learn about risk and how to prevent or reduce risk by taking precautions. Next they listen to a story about risk, where Clifford, the big red dog, helps reduce the risk of danger by taking precautions. After the story, the students complete a story sequencing activity based on Clifford's actions. Finally, they recognize that Clifford does not exist in the real world and talk about people in their families and communities that help protect them from risk.

This unit was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This unit is aligned to the NC Standards for 2nd Grade ELA. 

In this introductory critical literacy lesson, students will consider the perspectives of central but silent characters in the picture book Stevie, by John Steptoe. They will look at the story from these characters’ points of view and give voice to their thoughts and feelings, thereby gaining much deeper understandings of the story and realizing that every story truly gives just a partial account of what happened.

Listen to the story "The Rainbow Fish" . Once you have completed that you will create your own Rainbow Fish then you will write a story to go along with your fish.