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 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.

This lesson represents approximately 90 minutes of instruction and can be taught over 3-4 days.  The teacher introduces the lesson by explaining the five senses, and creates an anchor chart that will be used throughout the lesson. The teacher reads the first half of the text, modeling how to locate words that appeal to the senses and recording the words on an anchor chart. Next, the teacher reads the second half of the text and asks students to identify additional words that appeal to the senses, again recording them on the chart. With partners, students listen to a text and record words that appeal to the senses on graphic organizers. Students share a few of the words they found that appeal to the senses.  The other students hold up pictures (from the graphic organizers) that indicate which sense that word appeals to.

In this leson, students begin exploring sounds through a read-aloud of Dr. Seuss's, Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You? They then play with the sounds in their classroom, creating words that capture what they hear. Next, they explore sounds from selected websites and record what they hear on a chart, using spelling strategies to help them. Finally, students create original cinquain poems using sound words.

In this lesson, students listen to an illustrated narrative story aloud and use literacy skills to understand the central message of the 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.

Currently, poetry is something we teach "if there is time" at the end of the year. I would love to make poetry a more integral part of the 1st grade curriculum. Poetry is currently taught by the students reading a preprinted packet of poetry and the students knowing that they are poems.  It's a very archaic way of teaching it, and I would love to change that.

The students are introduced to poetry throughout our curriculum (Scott Foresman Reading Street) through songs and curriculum poems, but are never specifically taught what makes a poem. This blended unit will change that! This unit will fall at the end of the 1st grade school year.

Created By: Katharine Valz

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.

In this lesson, students read poetry that highlights the power of words and then explore words that unite people and words that divide people. Students will create a spinning word wheel diagram that shows how people react emotionally when different words are spoken to them.

In this lesson, students are first introduced to a variety of books using rebus writing. They then brainstorm lists of rhyming words that they could use in their own rebus poems. Finally, students create their own rebus poems and share them with an audience.