This resource accompanies our Rethink 2nd Grade ELA course. It includes 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 parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 2nd Grade English Language Arts content. Within the folder you will access Parent Guide PDFs in FIVE Languages: Arabic, English, Hindi, Spanish, and Vietnamese to help on-going communication with caregivers. 

Students will use the engineering design process, various materials and their imaginations to make a trap for a leprechaun after reading How to Catch a Leprechaun.

In this unit, students will read several books by Kevin Henkes. Students will study the characters, retell the stories, and will compare and contrast the plots of the different stories written by Kevin Henkes.

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 is a remix of a remix (by Stephanie Ballance) of https://goopennc.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/192 by Martha Levey and Toni Luther.  This is a multi-day unit on Cinderella and the many versions of the fairy tale. Students will listen to/read four versions of Cinderella identifying elements of culture and then compare/contrast two in groups. Then students will perform a reader's theater of one Cinderella story.  The whole class will remix the Cinderella story to write a modern-day version that takes into account their own cultures. Students will then be able to publish their version on our Google Classroom and also share a recording of the groups performing the Readers Theater. 

This lesson uses two books, Charlie Needs a Cloak by Tomie dePaola and A Symphony for the Sheep by C.M. Millen, to provide early exposure to economic concepts while encouraging reading comprehension. Prereading and postreading discussions and activities promote vocabulary building and analytical thinking. Students gain knowledge of the economic terms "natural resource" and "producer" as they make text-to-world connections.

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.

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.

In this lesson, students will read two traditional fairy tales and their Wild West versions. 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 will read two similar versions of the same fairy tale, such as the traditional tale of The Three Little Pigs and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by John Scieszka.  Students will acknowledge differences in the points of view of the characters, including speaking in different voices of each character when reading dialogue. Students will use illustrations and details in the two versions to describe the characters, setting, events and plot through questioning and analysis. The product of the lesson will a graphic organizer used to compare and contrast the two different versions of this story.  This lesson fits into the larger context of examining different genres in literature, learning the elements of the particular genre and comparing and contrasting literature. This lesson would fit well into a unit on fairytales, folklore, myths etc. 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.

As some of the foundational texts for beginning readers, fairy tales are a staple of many classrooms. This lesson allows students to engage with fairy tales from different regions around the world and compare important cultural elements of these stories.

As some of the foundational texts for beginning readers, fairy tales are a staple of many classrooms. This lesson allows students to engage with fairy tales from different regions around the world and compare important cultural elements of these stories. Students will then have the opportunity to pick three-four key illustrations and retell the story in their own words in a Hip Hop edition.

The teacher will use the book, Lon Po Po by Ed Young. The students will learn strategies and methods on how to describe the overall structure of a story. The students will also be shown how to show respect for other cultures through the use of this book, world maps, graphic organizers and other Chinese folktales. While reading this Chinese folktale, the students will be able to explain how the artistic expressions of the culture contributes to the community through food, crafts, and stories. This lesson was developed by Lisa Bruet as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.

Students will compare and contrast two or more versions of the same story (e.g., Cinderella stories) by different authors or from different cultures. The students will be able to understand how the cultures differ in food, language and arts through the two stories that are being compared and contrasted. Then, the students will use these tools that they know to help broaden and expand their cultural views by intergrating the folktales into the math, language arts and social studies curriculum.This lesson was developed by Lisa Bruet as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.            

In second grade students will learn to compare different versions of the Gingerbread story. They focus on how the story elements change with each story, but the basic theme stays the same. Then  in writing students are tasked with creating their own gingerbread rendition. In doing so, students often get lost in the middle of the story where the gingerbread character passes other characters and repeats the refrain. This project will help students use temporal words to provide sequence to their story as they define the places and people that are passed. Students must clearly describe 3 -4 places in a sequence (first, next, then, finally), as well as, provide an ending to their story. Once they have completed their story students are allowed to take a previously made gingerbread character and tape it to a small Dixie cup. Then the cup is placed over a mini-sphero. Students use premade landmarks that say first, next, then, finally  to navigate their character through their own sequence of events! This is a highly motivational and fun way to celebrate their hard work in creating a story and making it come to life!

In this unit, students will read and explore a folktale from Vietnam, while utilizing interdisciplinary connections in language arts, geography, science and social studies. Opportunities are provided for differentiated instruction as well as the development of story vocabulary. Terms include: narrator, point
of view, main character, dialogue, setting, title and quotation marks.

Este es el remix de una tabla usada para recolectar elementos de cultura encontrados en diferentes versiones de un libro (puede ser la historia de Cenicienta u otra historia que, manteniendo el cuento, contenga diferentes elementos culturales).   

In this lesson, students read a folktale. The teacher models the thinking and work required to recount the story and determine the lesson.  Students create story maps of the text that show the major events and the lesson in the text.