This book contains three levels of interactive grammar lessons and reading activities for beginning students of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages). The grammar section includes a select set of YouTube videos, and the three original readers include short picture or chapter stories. Each lesson is accompanied by self-correcting exercises.
Material Type: Textbook
Students whose first language is not English reflect on nature through readings, a visit to a green area, and bookmaking using the writing process and peer feedback.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
Students will explore five different "Discovery Buckets". These buckets will give them opportunities to practice expressing both their thoughts and feelings. Main Curriculum Tie: English Language Arts Kindergarten Speaking and Listening Standard 6, Speak audibly and express thoughts, feelings, and ideas clearly. We recognize that an increased ability to communicate thoughts and feelings gives children the skills they need in their interactions with others. Acceptance by peers is not only correlated with positive attitudes toward school; it is a powerful predictor of social adjustment throughout life. This lesson helps children understand their emotions and how to appropriately express thoughts and feelings with others.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
This strategy guide introduces the concept of using Exit Slips in the classroom to help students reflect on what they have learned and express what or how they are thinking about the new information. Exit Slips easily incorporate writing into the content area classroom and require students to think critically. The Exit Slip strategy is used to help students process new concepts, reflect on information learned, and express their thoughts about new information. This strategy requires students to respond to a prompt given by the teacher, and is an easy way to incorporate writing into many different content areas. Furthermore, the Exit Slip strategy is an informal assessment that will allow educators to adapt and differentiate their planning and instruction.
Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Students make purposeful choices for their reading materials, thinking about their reasons for reading a book and using strategies to match books to their abilities.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Help Spanish-speaking English-language learners unlock the mysteries of their new language by using a bilingual book to recognize unfamiliar words and construct meaning from the text.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
In this strategy, students read aloud to each other, pairing more fluent readers with less fluent readers. Likewise, this strategy can be used to pair older students with younger students to create “reading buddies.” Additionally, children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a text that they have already read, for continued understanding and fluency work. This research-based strategy can be used with any book or text in a variety of content areas, and can be implemented in a variety of ways.
Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy
In this lesson, students build classroom community by exploring environmental print and a teacher-created display that focuses on a favorite book. They then create and share their own presentations.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
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.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Through a close reading of "Amelia Bedelia", students reread the material to discuss text-dependent questions, promoting deep thinking about the text and its characters.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
By reading and rereading the passage closely combined with classroom discussion about it, students will explore the historical truths related to poverty, city construction, and city services that led to the disaster. In this reading, students learn about historical disasters, but they may not fully comprehend causes or how human actions, nature, or even luck contributed to them, rendering history a flat subject to be memorized rather than explored. When combined with writing about the passage and teacher feedback, students will better understand the dangers inherent in cities and the government role in mitigating that danger. This close reading exemplar is intended to model how teachers can support their students as they undergo the kind of careful reading the Common Core State Standards require. Teachers are encouraged to take these exemplars and modify them to suit the needs of their students.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Assessment, Lesson Plan, Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Adapting the song "A-Hunting We Will Go," students put a "whale" in a "pail" and even "take a little "bear" and hug it if we "dare"."
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students create acrostic poems using their names and the names of things that are important to them.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
This book contains 10 easy picture stories for beginning students of English. The stories have a Lexile level of 100L-500L and address common home and school situations. Each story includes images, self-correcting comprehension exercises, and a conversation prompt.
Material Type: Textbook
Looking to help students practice "reading" images for a variety of contextual meanings while engaging in content area study? This lesson uses images of the Boston Massacre to deepen students' comprehension of both the event and the effects of propaganda. Students begin by completing an anticipation guide to introduce them to Boston Massacre, propaganda, and British/colonial reactions to the massacre. They then complete an image analysis to make inferences about various images of the massacre. The culminating activity-a presentation about students' observations and inferences-demonstrates students' knowledge of the Boston Massacre and propaganda in a variety of ways. This lesson benefits English-language learners (ELLs) and struggling readers because it involves viewing images, participating in discussions, working with peers, and listening to a read-aloud that reinforces the lesson content and vocabulary.
Material Type: Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy
A little understanding can go a long way. After learning about difficulties that Palestinian youths face, students will write a letter to an official discussing these issues.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
In this unit, students will become familiar with fables and trickster tales from different cultural traditions and will see how stories change when transferred orally between generations and cultures. They will learn how both types of folktales employ various animals in different ways to portray human strengths and weaknesses and to pass down wisdom from one generation to the next. Use the following lessons to introduce students to world folklore and to explore how folktales convey the perspectives of different world cultures.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
CommonLit is a nonprofit education technology organization dedicated to ensuring that all students, especially students in Title I schools, graduate with the reading, writing, communication, and problem-solving skills they need to be successful in college and beyond.
Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan, Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy
The Girl Who Thought In Pictures by Julia Finley Mosca, illustrated by Daniel Rieley | Read Aloud for Kids | The Reading BoothBook Description (from the auth... Excellent resource to introduce autism, poetry, and perseverance.
Material Type: Reading
In this strategy guide, you’ll learn about Partner Talk—a way to provide students with another learning opportunity to make learning their own through collaboration and discussion. Partner Talk can be used for assessing classwork, making connections to prior knowledge, discussing vocabulary, or simplifying concepts. One of the main goals of the English Language Arts Common Core Standards is to build natural collaboration and discussion strategies within students, helping to prepare them for higher levels of education and collaboration in the workforce. In today’s classrooms, students are using complex texts and are being asked to use a variety of strategies and provide evidence-based responses. Partner Talk is a best practice that gives students an active role in their learning and scaffold the experience for students.
Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy
