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 Writing.

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.

In this lesson, students first write a message to their families explaining what they have learned about a topic. Next, they write a message comparing what they know to new information that they are just learning. Finally, they write a message saying how they feel about something they encountered in class, such as a favorite character in a book.

This lesson has been designed to be delivered in literacy rotation centers. In order to have a successful experience it is suggested to have a teacher and a teacher assistant to support the reading and writing center. The lesson is designed for a Spanish Immersion setting so many of the resources and lesson components will be in Spanish. This lesson was developed by Paola Contreras-Ramirez 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.

(This lesson for AIG learners follows a close reading of The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry.  The classroom lesson should include independent reading of the book as well as teacher read-aloud. Students should learn vocabulary from the book and should be able to demonstrate understanding of key details in the text and their central theme or lesson (interdependence, environmental awareness.)  This lesson could be part of a larger science unit encompassing the important role the rainforest plays in our environment.  In this lesson, the learner will find evidence in the text that shows cause and effect relationships, reasons in the text explicitly given to support a point and will produce a written work through a RAFT assignment. In this lesson extension, he or she can choose a specific role or voice to support a point or opinion. The RAFT assignment allows the learner to apply the text to the real world and a real audience. 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 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.

In this lesson, students will be introduced to Family Message Journals. The teacher introduces journals by demonstrating the process of writing a letter. Students are then led into composing through guided writing and finally independent writing of messages that they will bring home for family (or others) to read and write a reply. Messages focus on classroom learning and activities in which children have participated at school. A letter to families is included so that they understand what they are expected to do with the children's daily journal messages and why.

In this lesson, students will read 'The Important Book' and write an opinion piece on an object from the book.

The NC Kids' Exploration Journals are a fun educational tool to help youth explore their communities and natural surroundings! Each journal contains: 18 multidisciplinary activities with guided prompts, 6 lined journal pages for recording observations and reflections, and 4 blank pages for individual creativity.

The digital versions of the journal are designed to be printed out for students either as individual activities or in its entirety so that they can explore their school yard, local park, or own backyard. Though designed for 1st - 5th-graders, older audiences may enjoy them too! They are also available in both English and Spanish languages.

While supplies last, hard copies of the journals are currently available for free to teachers by contacting karen.ipock@ncdcr.gov.

Students will listen to the story and then record why they chose which animal they would be.

Using the DPI online graphic organizer for synthesizing information found at http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/acre/standards/common-core-tools/organizers/ela/synthesizing.pdf, students will identify the reasons the author of the article “Garden Helpers” provides to support his point that not all garden creatures are pests.  The students will fill out a graphic organizer to show evidence that some creatures are helpful, and then they will fill out another organizer to show that some are harmful. After identifying the reasons in the text, the students will write a summary opinion on the organizer, drawing upon other resources for further information and investigation.  After completing both organizers, AIG students will synthesize the information about helpful and harmful garden creatures in order to write an explanatory/informative report on living creatures in the garden. 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, letter-sound correspondences are taught within a meaningful context in an explicit, systematic, and extensive manner. This lesson uses onset-rime analogy to present word families and spelling patterns. An onset is the consonant letter before the vowel in a given word or syllable, and a rime is the vowel and consonants that follow the vowel in a given word or syllable. Thus, in the word bill, the onset is the letter b and the rime is the letters ill. Furthermore, this lesson supports cooperative and integrative learning where students and teacher learn together and carry out tasks collaboratively.

Students will listen to a book and then write about it. Students can write about their favorite part, add another page for the book, add a character to the story, or discuss what they learned.