Families and caregivers, you play an important role in your child’s language learning. Children can learn new words every day and build their vocabulary by using descriptive language. When playing this game you and your child will use language to describe and guess hidden household items.

This document provides guidance to families and caregivers in supporting their child's vocabulary development by learning a few words at a time and practicing them often until they are used regularly by the child. This document is available in English and Spanish.

Families and caregivers, you play an important role in your child’s language learning. Children can learn new words every day by listening, speaking, writing, and drawing. The purpose of this activity is to help your child learn and practice a small set of new words over time, making them part of their vocabulary.

In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students learn about the varied physical and behavioral adaptations that animals rely on to help them survive changing environmental conditions, such as the arrival of winter.

Sarah E. Goode was one of the first African-American women to get a US patent. Working in her furniture store, she recognized a need for a multi-use bed and through hard work, ingenuity, and determination, invented her unique cupboard bed. She built more than a piece of furniture. She built a life far away from slavery, a life where her sweet dreams could come true. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Your school has had an influx of new students and every class seems to be bursting at the seams! You have an additional 10 students just in your classroom alone. Because of this limited space, your school is looking for solutions. They decided that every student is going to get a new desk and chair, but it’s going to be PORTABLE. That way, you can take your desk & chair with you wherever you might go.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

This video depicts a kindergarten small group engaging in a syllables activity. There are 5 students in this demonstration and they are using manipulatives.

For this lesson, students will learn how to pick a topic for a research paper. They will then think of questions they want to answer in their research paper, and use those questions to guide what they take notes on. A detailed PowerPoint explains how to use PowerPoint to organize and take notes.

Stories and poems that have a familiar structure can create a supportive context for learning about the writing process, building students' background knowledge, and scaffolding their creation of original stories. In this lesson for students in second or late first grade, teachers help students explore the concepts of beginning, middle, and ending by reading a variety of stories and charting the events on storyboards. As they retell the stories, students are encouraged to make use of sequencing words (first, so, then, next, after that, finally). A read-aloud of Once Upon a Golden Apple by Jean Little and Maggie De Vries introduces a discussion of the choices made by an author in constructing a plot. Starting with prewriting questions and a storyboard, students construct original stories, progressing from shared writing to guided writing; independent writing is also encouraged.

One of the most difficult aspects of writing is keeping audience in mind throughout the writing process. Developing lessons that support this strategy for writing is essential in the elementary classroom. This lesson supports first-grade students in learning about audience. Through interactive writing, students work together to create a genuine invitation letter for a group of their peers. In addition to the interactive writing experience, students work independently to create invitation letters for their families. Extension activities include conducting additional interactive writing experiences, reading books with samples of letters, and creating invitations at a learning center.

This site contains curated resources related to teaching digital literacy and digital fluency.

This is a workshop on Skimming, Scanning, and Interpreting | Teaching Foreign Languages K-12 Workshop.

This video walks viewers through a 3-step routine for teaching academic vocabulary to young students. The routine is aligned with evidence-based recommendations from two What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guides on teaching early literacy skills to all students and may be especially beneficial for students whose home language is not English.

This REL West video walks viewers through a 3-step routine for teaching academic vocabulary to young students.

Dr. Steve Graham discusses ways you can help a student with writing difficulties in our webcast, "Teaching Writing".

An overview of the Common Core research techniques to address Common Core research standards.

This open textbook offers students of technical writing an introduction to the processes and products involved in professional, workplace, and technical writing. The text is broken up into sections reflecting key components of researching, developing, and producing a technical report. Readers will also learn about other professional communication, designing documents, and creating and integrating graphics. Written especially for an academic setting, this book provides readers with guidance on information literacy and documenting sources. This book was collected, adapted, and edited from multiple openly licensed sources.

Writers and film buffs alike will sharpen their skills in this multimedia unit as they work together to author and design a digital video.

Students tell their life stories in this lesson about autobiographies based on family photographs.

Students use both analytical and creative skills to adapt passages from a novel with significant internal dialogue and conflict, such as Toni Morrison's "Beloved", into a ten-minute play.

This fact sheet from the International Dyslexia Association provides guidance on why evaluation to determine a child's reading difficulties is important, when a child should be evaluated for dyslexia, what should be included in the evaluation, and possible outcomes of an evaluation to help plan for intervention.