This activity takes place after students have had the opportunity to learn strategies such as using place value, decomposing into tens, commutative property, using concrete models, or strategies they come up with on their own to add two numbers together. Students should work in small groups of three or four. Before this activity, students may make a list of strategies they know for adding numbers or they may identify a list already posted in the classroom. Place three or four sets of 0-9 number tiles (digit-cards) in a bag. The first student draws 4 number tiles and uses them to create a 2-digit plus 2-digit addition problem. All students in the group use models, pencil and paper, or whiteboards to solve the problem using a strategy. Taking turns, each student has the opportunity to convince others that the strategy chosen is the best or most efficient for the problem. 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.

In this lesson, students will use KWL charts and interactive writing as key components of organizing information. As a class, students list what they know about insects, prompted by examining pictures in an insect book. Students them pose questions they have about insects, again using picture books as a visual prompt. Students then search for answers to the questions they have posed, using Websites, read-alouds, and easy readers. Periodic reviews of gathered information become the backdrop to ongoing inquiry, discussion, reporting, and confirming information. The lesson culminates with the publishing of a collaborative question and answer book which reports on information about the chosen topic, with each student contributing one page to the book.

In this lesson, students summarize biographies of leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Lydia Maria Child, William Lloyd Garrison, Claudette Colvin, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

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.

As a way to support teachers with English Language Arts (ELA) instruction during the pandemic, the NCDPI ELA team created choice boards featuring standards-aligned ELA activities.The intended purpose of these choice boards is to provide a way for students to continue standards-based learning while schools are closed. Each activity can be adapted and modified to be completed with or without the use of digital tools. Many activities can also be repeated with different texts. These standards-based activities are meant to be a low-stress approach to reinforcing and enriching the skills learned during the 2019-2020 school year. The choice boards are to be used flexibly by teachers, parents, and students in order to meet the unique needs of each learner.Exploration activities are provided for a more self-directed or guided approach to independent learning for students. These activities and sites should be used as a way to explore concepts, topics, skills, and social and emotional competencies that interest the learner. 

Students will read books about families and make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections using those books. Students gain a deeper understanding of a text when they make authentic connections. Beginning with a read-aloud of Donald Crews' "Bigmama's", the instructor introduces and models the strategy of making connections. Read-alouds of "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats and "The Relatives Came" by Cynthia Rylant are followed by activities that help students learn to apply each type of text connection when responding to texts. After sharing and discussing connections in a Think-Pair-Share activity, students plan and write a piece describing a personal connection to one of the texts.

Getting children to use their imaginations when writing a story can sometimes be difficult. Drawing, however, can create a bridge between the ideas in a child's head and the blank piece of paper on the desk. In this lesson, students use factual information gathered from the Internet as the basis for creating a nonfiction story. Story elements, including setting, characters, problem, solution, and endings, are then used as a structure for assembling students' ideas into a fiction story.

The following lesson is optional.These are two Skype lessons that were planned with a 2nd grade teacher from Guatemala, for our students to connect and meet one another via a virtual form of communication using Skype. I was connected with a class in Guatemala with the help of Teachers 2 Teachers Global (For more information see Digital Resource for Skype Project in the Instructional Unit). The purpose of this activity was so that my 2nd grade Dual Language students could communicate in Spanish with a 2nd grade class in Guatemala who was learning English at their school. This lesson was developed by Gabriela Bermingham 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 are given their "Global Folders" and the teacher explains to them how it will be used throughout this learning unit. The teacher introduces the global issue of: challenges children face in trying to go to school around the world. This lesson was taught to my dual language students in English during their social studies content time. All available resources are provided in English.This lesson was developed by Gabriela Bermingham 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 learn about new friends: Manju from Nepal, Wadley from Haiti, and Jednel from Tanauan. Students learn how different natural disasters, such as earthquakes and typhoons, have destroyed schools in various parts of the world due to their catastrophic nature, leaving children struggling go to school and get an education. These are cross-curricular lessons that include the teachings of science, social studies and the language arts. These lessons were taught in English during social studies/science content time.This lesson was developed by Gabriela Bermingham 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.            

The students will be reading a biography about Ruby Bridges called, Ruby Bridges Goes to School, My True Story (Bridges, 2009). She is an American activist who became a symbol of the Civil Rights movement. At age six, she became amongst the youngest of a group of African American students to integrate schools in the south. She was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960. The purpose of this lesson is for students to learn about the struggles that African-American children faced in trying to get an equal education, here in the United States around the 1960's. This lesson is taught in English during the social studies block.This lesson was developed by Gabriela Bermingham 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 learn how transportation can be a challenging factor for some children to go to school in other areas of the world. There are children all over the world who are challenged in going to school because of how far their school is, and/or because of their means of transportation. This lesson was taught during social studies content block in English.This lesson was developed by Gabriela Bermingham 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 this lesson, students take turns taking home a book bag that includes a stuffed toy, a book to read with their families, art supplies, a topic to discuss, and a journal to complete as a family. The students then return the bag the following day and share their entries with the class. After every student has taken the bag home, the journal is bound into a book for the classroom library. The goal is to invite parents to join their children in these literacy activities.

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.

In this lesson, the repetition, rhythm, and rhyme of Martin’s works provide opportunities for students to hear fluent reading modeled before participating in the readings through literary performance. The lesson provides students the chance to focus on their fluency and comprehension. The readers theater section of the lesson allows students to demonstrate these skills for an audience, while improving their literacy skills further.

In this video lesson, the teacher will model how to ask and answer questions while reading informational texts with partners and independently with sticky notes.

In this lesson, students will read Laura Joffe Numeroff's 'If You Give a Mouse a Cookie' to combine word-skill work with prediction and sequencing practice. Students learn about cause-effect relationships during a shared reading of the book and then complete a cloze exercise that uses context and initial consonant clues. Students then create story circles that display the events of the story and use these circles to retell the story to a peer. Finally, the students compose their own stories featuring themselves in the role of the mouse.

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.

After whole class participation in a Socratic seminar led by the teacher, with procedures and ground rules stressed, AIG students will be grouped in pairs to plan and lead small group Socratic seminars for their second grade class. The seminars will focus on fables during a fables and folktales literature unit. 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.