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.

In this unit, students will research insects and dive into writing juicy paragraphs with main ideas and supporting details. They will create their insect out of various materials to get ready for the gallery opening.

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 unit, students will develop an understanding of nonfiction through peer interaction and hands-on experiences with books. They use graphic organizers to record their thinking and new learning.

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.

The original resource written by  Haniah Lerner is for use during independent work time or literacy stations. The students listen to stories about elections, then choose one text to write the main idea, two key details, and define new wordsThis Remix is an activity to complete before the independent resource. It focuses on the book "Lillian's Right to Vote."   The students will gain an understanding of the concept voting, focusing on the difference between of a right or a privilege.

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.

In this unit, students begin by evaluating book reviews written and read aloud by other children. Next, students discuss the effectiveness of, what components are included in, what they learned from, and what they might change about the book reviews. Once students have a foundation for book review components and structure, they choose a favorite book and write a review. Finally, students publish their reviews by videotaping them or posting them online.

This inquiry is an initial exploration into the concepts of interdependence through the lens of community economics and the idea of an economy as a diverse, mutually supportive web of needs and wants, workers and consumers, and problems and solutions. This inquiry challenges students to understand that through businesses, town organizations, and local governments, a community meets the needs and wants of its people, finding strength in collective efforts to address problems.

This lesson will extend the story Money Madness in the Wonder’s book by having students create an online grocery order that another student will fulfill for them. They will then use the Beebots or Sphero Bolts to “grocery shop” around the Beebot map, “fulfill” the order, calculate the total, and calculate the change they need to give back to the shopper.