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 this lesson, students understand the importance of using clear and precise communication when giving directions.

In this lesson, students will read Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish. Students will discuss text-dependent questions to promote an understanding of the story’s character. Through subsequent readings, they construct and support arguments concerning the character traits of Amelia Bedelia and use the text to determine how Amelia Bedelia and the Rogers can have different reactions to the same events. After these discussions, students demonstrate their understanding of character by completing a trading card for Amelia Bedelia.

This lesson uses music and art in a vocabulary study of unfamiliar words from the song "America the Beautiful," increasing students' vocabulary while also increasing their knowledge of U.S. geography. A discussion to activate students' prior knowledge about sights and scenery throughout the United States is followed by a read-aloud and introduction to the song "America the Beautiful," which is then sung in each session of the lesson.

This lesson describes how to use selected fiction and nonfiction literature and careful questioning techniques to help students identify factual information about animals. Children, first, identify possible factual information from works of fiction which are read aloud, then they listen to read-alouds of nonfiction texts to identify and confirm factual information. This information is then recorded on charts and graphic organizers. Finally, students use the Internet to gather additional information about the animal and then share their findings with the class.

This lesson is for Grades 1 - 2 on literacy. At Home Learning Lessons are a partnership between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, PBS North Carolina, and the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.  Each lesson contains a video instructional lesson, a PDF lesson plan with a transcript, and a PDF file of extension activities.

This lesson is for Grades 1 - 2 on literacy. At Home Learning Lessons are a partnership between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, PBS North Carolina, and the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.  Each lesson contains a video instructional lesson, a PDF lesson plan with a transcript, and a PDF file of extension activities.

This lesson is for Grades 1 - 2 on literacy. At Home Learning Lessons are a partnership between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, PBS North Carolina, and the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.  Each lesson contains a video instructional lesson, a PDF lesson plan with a transcript, and a PDF file of extension activities.

In this lesson, students will use mentor texts and will construct a definition of alliteration. Using these texts as models, students experiment with creating alliterative sentences.

Students will listen to Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle to learn color and animal names from the text. Students will  complete a sentence frame with teacher support/facilitation, then create their own personal story booklet of the text to reinforce concepts taught and learned. Students will engage in activities such as choral reading of the text and practice independently reading the text aloud to a family member at home for additional independent practice. 

In this lesson, students will listen to a story about the importance of pollinator gardens in our community. They will discuss flowers that could be used in a pollinator garden and will program the Bee Bot to move through the pollinator garden according to the algorithm they create.

Students discuss literature on shadows. Teachers use questioning techniques to probe prior knowledge. Students begin to explore scientific concepts and develop and test hypotheses. After studying shadows, recording observations of shadows, and hearing poetry about shadows, students create their own poetic response incorporating their knowledge.

In this lesson, students will read Shel Silverstein's "Sick" aloud, students summarize the poem and count the words in their summary. They then summarize the poem again, using only one word. Students explain their choices and discuss the various words offered as a summary. The class then chooses the one word that best represents what is happening in the poem. Finally, students read a second poem, individually or in small groups, and summarize it using only one word.

In this lesson, students explore the different purposes readers have and how to determine what their purpose for reading is. Students also learn how to evaluate whether a book is at the right reading level and length for their abilities.

In this lesson, students listen to events in a story to learn about how compromises work, and determine if the compromises were successful.

In this lesson, students complete two prewriting activities, one on brainstorming ideas using story maps, and one on creating beginnings of stories. They then work on two collaborative-writing activities in which they draft an "oversized" story on chart paper. Each student works individually to read what has been written before, adds the "next sentence," and passes the developing story on to another student. The story is passed from student to student until the story is complete. In a later lesson Collaborative Stories 2: Revising, the story is revised by the groups.

In this lesson, students will learn how to ask 'I wonder' questions while reading 'Grandfather Twilight'.

This lesson plan features an example of a cumulative literary experience or “literature unit” structured around a text set made up of conceptually-related fiction and nonfiction for reading aloud and for independent reading.

Beginning with a comparative study of selected, illustrated retellings of the traditional folktale “Little Red Riding Hood,” including versions from several different cultures, this literature unit continues with a study of modern revisions of this well-known tale. After students have an opportunity to explore similarities and differences among the retellings and revisions, they are introduced to fiction and nonfiction texts featuring wolves in order to provide them with a different perspective of the “villain” in the "Little Red Riding Hood" tales. The unit culminates in a class-written version of the folktale.