Students learn to sing the song, "A-Hunting We Will Go" with the original verses and learn to sing several new verses that support rhyming concepts. They then brainstorm pairs of rhyming words to create their own verses for the song. As a follow up activity, students can create original verses using other simple rhyming songs as a framework.

Many Kindergarten students come up with "action words" or verbs easily after demonstrating actions. Many of these emergent readers know more words thatn they use in daily writing/reading/sharing.
This lesson is easy to use in small groups and encourages them to broaden their vocabulary in a fun format, a personal Action ABC book. They can access and practice these new (and old) verbs easily and have unique collections they have designed!

The activities in this lesson provide a foundation for using nonfiction resources for developing and answering questions about gathered information. Using a wide variety of nonfiction literature, students learn to sort and categorize books to begin the information-gathering process. Then, working with partners and groups, using pictures and text, students are guided through the process of gathering information, asking clarifying questions, and then enhancing the information with additional details. Students complete the lesson by collaboratively making “Question and Answer” books for the classroom library. This is a high-interest foundation builder for using nonfiction literature in research as well as for pleasure reading

This mini unit walks students through the question/discovery process of nonfiction literature.  The first lesson encourages students to wonder while reading.  Then students research to find the answers to their questions.  They explore ways to show/write their new learning.  As a class the kids work to publish 1 or 2 classroom books on the research topic.  This is a great way to introduce the nonfiction unit and then let each student write thier own question book based on the process they used with the class book.

Do worms live underground? Are they good diggers? Can they really read and write? As students read Doreen Cronin's Diary of a Worm in this lesson, they learn to separate the facts from the fictional details. Students begin the lesson by brainstorming what they know about worms. They then begin examining the book in layers. Four read-aloud sessions engage students by focusing attention on different features of the text in each session. In a whole-group setting, students explore the illustrations, fictional details, nonfiction details, and captions and speech bubbles. In this way, students are given concrete strategies that they can use to help differentiate narrative and informational elements in other books they read.

This lesson offers one way to build a bridge between the home and school learning experience, through a fun, take-home literacy activity.
Students take turns taking home a book bag that includes a stuffed toy, a book to read with their families, art supplies, a topic to discuss, and a journal to complete as a family. The students then return the bag the following day and share their entries with the class. After every student has taken the bag home, the journal is bound into a book for the classroom library. The teacher then selects a new topic and book to start a second rotation. The goal is to invite parents to join their children in these literacy activities.

Junie B., as she insists on being called, is an opinionated, lively, character in Barbara Park's series of books, and she is sure to delight primary students. In this unit, the teacher reads aloud selections from Junie B., First Grader (at last!). Students discuss the text with a partner and then individually compose sentences about key events from the story. Each student also creates and adds items to a mystery box, or a box that holds items or pictures referenced in the story. After students have listened to the entire story, they use their mystery boxes to retell the story to a classmate. As a culminating activity, students use the mystery boxes and the sentences they composed to make a related stapleless book about the story.

This lesson will be used in conjunction with Code.org's Course 1 Curriculum - https://studio.code.org/s/course1. For the class period after completing Lesson 5 - Maze: Debugging, students will use Wonder Workshop's Dash robots in groups to create and debug their Dash robot from one place to another in a preassigned part of the classroom using the Blockly app on their iPads.