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 unit was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 2nd Grade ELA in Speaking & Listening.

This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 2nd Grade English Language Arts content.

The central idea of this unit is how sharing artifacts is a fundamental characteristic of humans that connects them to each other and culture.

This activity is designed to help students retell a story in sequence in a unique way using coding robots such as spheros and ozobots.

In this lesson, students create autobiographies by taking photographs that represent their life and writing paragraph captions. Students will then publish and electronic version to share with others.

Students will learn about the characteristics of butterflies and will engage in multiple activities to build their understanding of how a butterfly’s characteristics help it survive and interact with its environment. In this CCSS lesson students will use text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

This capstone lesson takes students through the process of designing, developing, and showcasing their own Play Lab projects! To ensure this process goes smoothly, we have provided a step-by-step structure for students to follow, from planning on paper to coding on our website. In addition, we offer ideas to help teachers facilitate a showcase finale!

In this lesson, students will study four different versions of the Cinderella story. As a group students will identify the good characters, mean characters, problem, and solution of each story. Story elements will be written down on a large poster board and categorized so students can draw identify patterns and differences. Then, students will work in small groups of seven to identify the main parts of the traditional story. Each student will choose a part in the story to illustrate. After illustrations are complete students will practice retelling their part of the story. Students will then scan in their illustrations and use the program, Movie Maker, to format their group's story. Students will record their portion of the retelling with a microphone.

After the whole class science unit of study on sound, which includes biographical information about Helen Keller, the AIG students will select an additional famous person with a disability to research. They will engage in research and write a short biography of their selected notable person to be compiled in a class e-book. They will also increase their leadership and social skills through presenting to the whole class. 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 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.

Students will retell and summarize a story by using math vocabulary, equations, and pictures.

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. 

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.

This research task for gifted learners will extend classroom integrated instruction within a science unit on states of matter using close reading of informational texts and creation of a differentiated product. Students will connect the hands-on regular classroom instruction and demonstration of changes of water in a container before and after freezing with the effects of global warming on the melting of the polar ice cap. AIG students will choose from a menu of learning style-based tasks which include technology and collaborative learning experiences. Upon completion, they will give an oral presentation to the class. 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 will create posters based upon graded readers and present the posters to classmates. The lesson provides a template for the posters, instructions for presentations, and tips on student notetaking. This resource supports English language development for English Language Learners.

Students will study a variety of historical figures and specifically focus on one person to understand more about his/her life.

Students collect data within their school about current social issues and create graphs to display and analyze the data. Students simultaneously read and write fables based on the prevalent social issues. Students then make 2D illustrations for their fables and practice reading their stories aloud with fluency. The culminating event is a Meet the Author showcase for parents to hear the stories and get autographs from the new authors.

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 lesson, students will draw and write about a shared experience (e.g. trip, class performace); students will audio record their writing on VoiceThread.