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.

Students engage in games and chants to recognize the same sounds in different words. Students match objects with the same beginning or ending sound, identify whether a given sound occurs at the beginning or ending of a word, and connect phonemes with graphemes.

For this online interactive, students pick a color according to the color-vowel key and fill each word block according to the long and short vowel sounds. Students have fun with colors as they reinforce their concept of short and long vowels and learn new words. This is an interesting way to build students' vowel identification skills.

In this lesson, students explore books and magazines for words that have the "ig" rime, in addition to brainstorming their own words. Furthermore, assessment is included as students incorporate learned words in context and isolation.

Students will identify rhyming words; brainstorm rhyming words; create song verses; and practice rhyming using an online interactive tool.

Students will sort short A and long A words into the correct box.

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.

This activity was created for students to be able to sort short and long vowel sounds. Although the teacher example is that of the letterland characters, the students will still be able to complete the activity. They are sorting pictures, listening for the short sounds on slide 1 and the long sounds on slide 2.

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.

This lesson provides a framework for introducing students to short-vowel word families. Focusing first on the a family, students work together and individually to learn the word families –at, –an, –ap, and –ack. Teacher modeling is used to introduce the word sort, inviting students to compare, contrast, and reflect on these four word families. Students then work with a partner to practice sorting and reading words with increased speed and accuracy. As their skills and confidence improve, students are asked to sort, read, and write words individually. These lessons can also be adapted to teach other short-vowel word families.

Your students will apply their knowledge of letters and letter sounds as they play games and interact with letters online using what they see and learn to create their own ABC book.