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.

Students are prompted to use comparisons to discuss what they see as they picture walk through books about the ocean. They identify what these comparisons have in common to arrive at an informal name and definition of simile. They then create illustrations showing these comparisons. Next, students picture walk through two additional picture books about the ocean and comment about what they see. They are introduced to metaphor by rewording some of their comments into metaphors. They continue to note metaphors as the books are read aloud, and then name and define this new type of comparison. They again draw pictures to illustrate some of these metaphors. Students discuss why writers use these types of comparisons, then work to revise existing writing to incorporate figurative language through guided practice or independent work. Finally, students use templates to create a book on the ocean that features similes and metaphors.

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.

In this lesson, students are first introduced to inquiry notebooks and then use them record what they already know about worms. Next, students observe the cover of a fiction book about worms and make a hypothesis on whether the book is fact or fiction, and then check their hypotheses after the book is read aloud. Next, after an introduction to related scientific words such as hypothesis, habitat, attribute, predator, and prey, students conduct and record research and findings in their inquiry notebooks.

Getting children to use their imaginations when writing a story can sometimes be difficult. Drawing, however, can create a bridge between the ideas in a child's head and the blank piece of paper on the desk. In this lesson, students use factual information gathered from the Internet as the basis for creating a nonfiction story. Story elements, including setting, characters, problem, solution, and endings, are then used as a structure for assembling students' ideas into a fiction story.

(This lesson for AIG learners follows a close reading of The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry.  The classroom lesson should include independent reading of the book as well as teacher read-aloud. Students should learn vocabulary from the book and should be able to demonstrate understanding of key details in the text and their central theme or lesson (interdependence, environmental awareness.)  This lesson could be part of a larger science unit encompassing the important role the rainforest plays in our environment.  In this lesson, the learner will find evidence in the text that shows cause and effect relationships, reasons in the text explicitly given to support a point and will produce a written work through a RAFT assignment. In this lesson extension, he or she can choose a specific role or voice to support a point or opinion. The RAFT assignment allows the learner to apply the text to the real world and a real audience. 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 unit, students will begin their inquiry by comparing fiction and nonfiction books about animals, using a Venn diagram. They will list things they want to know about animals on a chart. As a class, students will vote on an animal to research. They will revise their question list, and then research the animal using prompts from an online graphic organizer. After several sessions of research, students will revisit their original questions and evaluate the information they have gathered. Finally, students will revise and edit their work and prepare to present their findings to an authentic audience.

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 count the days between Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Valentine’s Day and are challenged to complete 100 acts of kindness during that time. They brainstorm examples of kind acts they could do and discuss how to report acts of kindness they witness. They also select a service project to plan and complete together as a class. For the project’s duration, acts of kindness are tracked on a classroom chart. Students are encouraged to acknowledge kind acts by others through thank you notes, and families are encouraged to help report acts of kindness. The project culminates with a Valentine’s Day celebration.

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.

This document provides a description of what each standard means a student will know, understand and be able to do. The "unpacking" of the standards done in this document is an effort to answer a simple question, "What does this standard mean that a student must know and be able to do?" and to ensure the description is helpful, specific and comprehensive for educators.

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.

Using the DPI online graphic organizer for synthesizing information found at http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/acre/standards/common-core-tools/organizers/ela/synthesizing.pdf, students will identify the reasons the author of the article “Garden Helpers” provides to support his point that not all garden creatures are pests.  The students will fill out a graphic organizer to show evidence that some creatures are helpful, and then they will fill out another organizer to show that some are harmful. After identifying the reasons in the text, the students will write a summary opinion on the organizer, drawing upon other resources for further information and investigation.  After completing both organizers, AIG students will synthesize the information about helpful and harmful garden creatures in order to write an explanatory/informative report on living creatures in the garden. 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.