In this lesson children will listen as the teacher reads Chrysanthemum. Afterwards have a discussion about the story with a focus on the length of ChrysanthemumŐs name. Have the children compare the lengths of their own names using letter tiles, grid paper, and a class graph.

This unit continues the yearlong theme of what it means to be a good person in a community by pushing students to think about how the lessons and morals from traditional stories and folktales connect to their own lives and communities. The unit launches by listening to the book A Story, A Story, in which students see the power of storytelling not only for entertainment, but also for learning valuable life lessons. Over the course of the unit, students will explore lessons and morals about hard work, happiness, friendship, honesty, and humility. Through discussion and writing, students will be challenged to connect their own lives with the sometimes-abstract lessons and stories in order to build character and a strong community. It is our hope that this unit, in connection with other units in the sequence, will help students internalize the idea that we not only learn from our own experiences, but we also learn and grow by hearing the experiences of others.

The goal of this unit is to help students understand that families come in all different shapes and sizes, and that no matter what a family looks like, all families love and care for one another. The world we live in is increasingly diverse, especially within family structures. As students are building their own identities, it is important for students to see windows into their own lives so that they can develop healthy identities while also seeing windows into other lives so that they can embrace differences. Over the course of the unit, students will read stories that highlight a wide range of families and experiences, some of which may not be present in your school community. Ensuring that students see a wide range of families and experiences is crucial for helping students make sense of the world around them.

This unit is focused on two classic fairy tales: The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood. With each fairy tale, students are first exposed to a classic version, familiarizing themselves with the basic plot and lessons. Then students explore the ways authors change setting, characters, and plot while still maintaining the overall essence of the classic story. Some of the changes the authors make reflect the nuances of different cultures and environments, while others are made for entertainment and humor. Either way, students will explore the idea that different authors can use their own perspective and culture to shape the stories they write or retell. By reading multiple versions of the same classic fairy tale, students will also be able to grapple with the bigger lessons of each tale—the importance of not talking to strangers and the importance of respecting others’ property and privacy. Over the course of the unit, students will be challenged to think about how each of these unique themes is portrayed and how in each different version of the fairy tale the characters may learn the lesson in slightly different ways. It is our hope that this unit, in connection with others in the sequence, will help students see the power of storytelling and how simple stories can be changed and improved based on an author’s ideas and preferences.

In this unit, students explore the power of books and reading. In the first part of the unit, students experience the joy that books and reading bring to people's lives, and learn about some of the different ways people access books, especially in places where books are hard to get. In the second part of the unit, students learn about a range of barriers people have faced when trying to learn how to read, both in the United States and around the world, and build an understanding of the steps people have taken individually and as part of a community to overcome the barriers. Students will discover that not all people have had equal access to education and that in many places, past and present, receiving a high-quality education has not been an easy feat. It is our hope that this unit will help open students' eyes to injustices connected with educational access and will inspire students to take action to help members of their community get access to books or education.

The curriculum map is the single-best source to understand the year’s work in the module lessons for each grade level: a detailed view of the scope and sequence of the modules showing module titles, topics, targets, and standards explicitly taught and formally assessed in each module.

Lesson OverviewThis lesson is intended as a unit opener.  The students will:●     retell the sequence of events in a story.●     answer questions regarding key events of stories.●     Answer questions to help determine or clarify the meaning of words or phrases in a text.Teacher Planning, Examples of Response Methods and MaterialsSee Full Lesson Plan AttachedEssential QuestionEssential Question for Unit:  What role do I play in the environment?Focus Question for Week 1:  What is an environment?

Labs component for Grade K: Module 1 of the EL Education K-8 Language Arts Curriculum. Labs provide students with an hour of engaging, hands-on play to build habits of character, literacy skills, and module-related content understanding. Labs are directly connected to the content of this language arts module, Tools and Work, and should be implemented alongside the module lessons. For more information on Labs, please visit https://curriculum.eleducation.org/about-k-2-labs-and-ALL-block.

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This unit continues the yearlong theme of what it means to be a good person in a community by pushing students to think about how the lessons and morals from traditional stories and folktales connect to their own lives and communities. The unit launches by listening to the book A Story, A Story, in which students see the power of storytelling not only for entertainment, but also for learning valuable life lessons. Over the course of the unit, students will explore lessons and morals about hard work, happiness, friendship, honesty, and humility. Through discussion and writing, students will be challenged to connect their own lives with the sometimes-abstract lessons and stories in order to build character and a strong community. It is our hope that this unit, in connection with other units in the sequence, will help students internalize the idea that we not only learn from our own experiences, but we also learn and grow by hearing the experiences of others.

In reading, this unit builds on the foundation set in unit 1. Students will continue to practice asking and answering questions about key details in partners, individually, and in discussion, although questions will require a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the text than in unit 1. Students will learn to use the text and illustrations to both identify the setting of a story and think about why the setting is important to the story. Students will also be pushed to deeply analyze characters traits, actions, and feelings and how those change and evolve over the course of the story. Once students have a deep understanding of the setting and character motivation, students will grapple with figuring out the lessons the characters learn and how they learn them. Finally, in this unit students will begin to notice the nuanced vocabulary authors use to help a reader visualize how a character is feeling or acting.

In writing, students will continue to write daily in response to the text. The focus of this unit is on ensuring that students are answering the question correctly and using correct details from the illustrations and text to support their answer.

This is a lesson plan for the early primary to introduce the concept of "environment" through experience and literature.

In this blended unit students will review the parts of a story including characters, setting, beginning, middle, and end. Students will analyze a character based on their words, actions and thoughts. Students will describe complex characters, and identify character motivation giving supporting details from the text. They will explain how a character changes over the course of a narrative. Students will describe a setting and the events of a story using details from the text. Students will make inferences related to the details given in the story.

Currently, poetry is something we teach "if there is time" at the end of the year. I would love to make poetry a more integral part of the 1st grade curriculum. Poetry is currently taught by the students reading a preprinted packet of poetry and the students knowing that they are poems.  It's a very archaic way of teaching it, and I would love to change that.

The students are introduced to poetry throughout our curriculum (Scott Foresman Reading Street) through songs and curriculum poems, but are never specifically taught what makes a poem. This blended unit will change that! This unit will fall at the end of the 1st grade school year.

Created By: Katharine Valz

Published April 2013 by Amanda Kennedy (www.glamumous.co.uk)This volume contains media by various authors and artists which has been sourced from the public domain (where the copyright for this material has expired).As such, the publisher has chosen to publish this volume under the CC0 License. This means you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.If you would like to distribute this eBook on your own website, it would be much appreciated to link back to the editors own website, www.glamumous.co.uk, however this acknowledgement is not strictly required.