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 engaging lesson titled "Wolf Watchers: Crafting an Alarm to Keep Sheep Safe!", inspired by "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" from CKLA Knowledge, students delve into the concept of creating an alarm system to protect sheep from approaching wolves. The activity centers around designing an innovative alarm system that alerts villagers when a wolf is near.

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.

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 watch and listen to Eric Carle reading his book A Very Hungry Caterpillar and use visuals to sequence and retell the events of the story. Students will use days of the week vocabulary to help them sequence the story.

The story of "The Beauty and the Beast" has captivated us for many years.  It is fun to read or watch a video of.  But did it really happen?  It is fun to compare fiction and nonfiction.  Most students will in their backgrounds relate to a story like this.  Also it is fun for students to learn and then survey others based on what they have learned.

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 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.

Students will read aloud the book Joseph Had a Little Overcoat by Simm Taback and will determine relationships among story events by using conjunctions such as the word because to signal and explain simple relationships. The students will discuss the events in the story using a story sequencing activity and will identify conjunctions in the text used in the sequence. The lesson is then extended to teach the students the creative thinking process of SCAMPERing, which will be used to further the study of conjunctions. This divergent thinking process will result in a product that has been changed from its initial state to something new and improved, different and unique. Student partners will illustrate their final product(s) and will explain their “scamperation” orally using conjunctions in their speech. An optional follow-up assignment is explained at the end. 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. 

Students engage with the text by talking back to characters in Cinderella, dramatizing events in Bubba the Cowboy Prince, inserting themselves into the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and critiquing and controlling story elements in Little Red Cowboy Hat. After comparing and contrasting Little Red Riding Hood and Little Red Cowboy Hat, students plan and create an original fractured tale.

Students listen as the teacher reads different picture books by Ezra Jack Keats. Following the story, the students undertake class discussion and compare the different stories and plots using a story mapping graphic organizer. As a culminating project, students choose their own characters, define a problem and a solution appropriate for their characters, and then write their own problem-solving stories.

This lesson guides students in writing descriptions of 100th day bottles they create at home. Students will write clues about their bottles for a guessing game, practice descriptive writing, and create a class book. Several pieces of literature appropriate for use with this lesson are suggested.

In this lesson, students explore key elements of design such as color, shape, size, texture, density, and layout to understand and appreciate how these elements combine to convey meaning in Little Blue and Little Yellow, by Leo Lionni. Using art and digital media, they will then create their own designs to express meaning for setting, character relationships, and plot.

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.