Students will read and discuss the legends of three inseparable sisters, corn, bean, and squash, who only grow and thrive together. This relates to the tradition of interplanting corn, beans, and squash in the same mounds, which is widespread among Native American farming societies. It is a sustainable system that provided long-term soil fertility and a healthy diet for generations. The students will also develop an understanding of symbiotic relationships found between organisms living in the same ecosystems.

In order to fully comprehend reading materials, students need to understand the cause-and-effect relationships that appear in a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts. In this lesson, students learn cause-and-effect relationships through the sharing of a variety of Laura Joffe Numeroff picture books in a Reader's Workshop format. Using online tools or a printed template, students create an original comic strip via the writing prompt, "If you take a (third) grader to."  Students use various kinds of art to illustrate their strip and publish and present their completed piece to peers in a read-aloud format.

In this lesson, The Jolly Postman is used as an authentic example to discuss letter writing as a genre. Students explore the letters to the storybook characters delivered by The Jolly Postman. They then learn how to categorize their own examples of mail. The Jolly Postman uses well-known storybook characters, from fairy tales and nursery rhymes, as recipients of letters. This children's storybook is therefore ideal for using as a review of these genres of literature and as a means of helping children begin to explore rhyme and a variety of writing styles. Several pieces of literature appropriate for use with this lesson are suggested.

This module uses literature and informational text such as My Librarian Is a Camel to introduce students to the power of literacy and how people around the world access books. This module is intentionally designed to encourage students to embrace a love of literacy and reading.

Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .

In this eight-week module, students explore the questions: “Who is the wolf in fiction?” and “Who is the wolf in fact?” They begin by analyzing how the wolf is characterized in traditional stories, folktales, and fables. Then they research real wolves by reading informational text. Finally, for their performance task, students combine their knowledge of narratives with their research on wolves to write a realistic narrative about wolves.

This lesson can be added to the study of the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, specifically when it’s time to release your classroom monarchs in the fall. If your class isn’t studying monarchs, but the monarch migration is observed in your area, this is a lesson that could be used to find out more.The pursuits addressed are skills and intellectualism. The skills in this case are reading a map and gathering details from a text. Intellect is the practice of using skills to increase the understanding of the world around you, the practice of reflecting on how one uses a skill. According to Gholdy Muhammad in Cultivating Genius, Intellectualism is knowledge of people, places, things and concepts and the ability to put this knowledge into action. As learning takes place, one asks, “What am I becoming smarter about?” The students are using the pursuit of intellectualism to discover how science research works to discover new things about the world around them. 

A multi-age primary classroom teacher uses formative assessment as a barometer of student learning. She records anecdotal notes about her students' reading progress within an assessment notebook and references the notes for future instruction.