This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with 1st Grade ELA content.

These resources accompany our Rethink 1st Grade ELA course. They include 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 unit was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 1st Grade ELA in Language.

Computational thinking assists students to break down problems into smaller parts so that it is easier to understand and solve them. Abstraction is pulling out specific differences to make one solution work for multiple problems.

In this lesson, students are introduced to signs and other familiar environmental print through books, a Website, or an online gallery. Students then bring in examples of environmental print and share them with their classmates. Once enough examples are collected, students sort them into categories such as food, traffic signs, etc., and create a book for each category.

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.

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.

This resource supports English language development for English language learners. These activities teach students the vocabulary associated with transportation. Students complete matching, true or false, and questions activities. They create questions and engage in dialogues. Students listen, speak, read, adn write. Teaching suggestions can be found on http://www.tefl.net/esl-lesson-plans/TBW_Transport_Vocabulary_TS.pdf .

In this lesson, students will read the folk tale Jack and the Beanstalk and discuss the word giant and its beginning sound. Students then create their own lists of words that begin with the same sound. Then, students are introduced to words with the soft g sound and create a new list of words with this beginning sound. As a culminating activity, students work individually or in groups to categorize animal names into groups according to their beginning g sound.

In this lesson, students will study greeting cards to build motivation to read and write, practice reading fluency, and attend to print concepts. This experience allows students to study the crafting techniques authors use when they create greeting cards. After exploring various greeting cards, students have the opportunity to create greeting cards and share them with other students.

In this lesson, students learn to identify written words with similar endings by singing and reciting nursery rhymes. Students begin by reciting Humpty Dumpty, identifying two words with similar ending sounds, and creating their own lists of words with the same ending sound. Students repeat this procedure with words from Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater and Jack and Jill. Finally, students access a website to identify the word families featured in other nursery rhymes and then create an illustration and text based on their favorite nursery rhyme.