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 Non-Fiction Literature.

In this lesson, students will use KWL charts and interactive writing as key components of organizing information. As a class, students list what they know about insects, prompted by examining pictures in an insect book. Students them pose questions they have about insects, again using picture books as a visual prompt. Students then search for answers to the questions they have posed, using Websites, read-alouds, and easy readers. Periodic reviews of gathered information become the backdrop to ongoing inquiry, discussion, reporting, and confirming information. The lesson culminates with the publishing of a collaborative question and answer book which reports on information about the chosen topic, with each student contributing one page to the book.

Students will look a page from a nonfiction book and explain how they know the book is fiction vs nonfiction.

Students will explore the question of why honeybees are attracted to certain flowers and identify the ways honeybees' need for food can be met in environments in various areas of the world. They will communicate their findings to their peers through a media presentation.This lesson was developed by Gisele Cauley 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 video, students will listen and watch a rap all about nonfiction books and the text features they have. The rap is on slide 5.

In this video lesson, the teacher will model how to ask and answer questions while reading informational texts with partners and independently with sticky notes.

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.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.

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.

Students will use text features to help predict a nonfiction text before reading.

This 5-E lesson introduces the use of nonfiction materials from the library with a maker component. Students willexamine nonfiction materials,draw diagrams,make models,ask questions of others,and explain their work. 

Students will be identifying various text features, and their purpose.  Students will also demonstrate how to use them.  This activity can be modified to fit various text features taught. 

Students can view these slides to help them understand text features better. This resource explains what text features are and provides examples of the following titles; headings; bold and italic print; illustrations and photographs; and captions.

Students will learn more about text features and how they work by making their own glossary.

Students research information about animals and communicate in written form and use multimedia tools to create pages for a class book and presentation.