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.

Author: Ned Dorff, Teacher, Aldo Leopold Community School, Green Bay Area Public SchoolsUnit Title: Nature Journaling Indoors and Outdoors for the Primary GradesGrade Level: 1st and 2nd gradeContent Area(s): Writing, ScienceStudents learned how to nature journal in the classroom during the late winter and then used our skills to head out into our neighborhood for outdoor journaling experiences. With the aid of an eagle cam, we were able to explore science concepts of life cycles over the period of several months. Our practice indoors also allowed us to transfer knowledge to what we were seeing outside.

CESA #1 EL OER Project

Many ELLs have trouble formulating questions in English. This activity introduces story elements with a focus on asking questions to organize before writing a fiction piece.

This series of eight lessons has students compare information found in fiction and non-fiction texts related to whales.  Students learn to formulate research questions, interact with an online scientist and write letters using the writing process.

Our goal is for our students to become proficient readers and writers who display agency and independence. This interactive hyperdoc training module, about UDL and Reading Workshop, is designed to help educators develop an ever-growing toolkit of strategies that will remove barriers to learning and create options for how instruction is presented, how students express their ideas, and how we can engage students in their learning.

In this lesson, the teacher demonstrates how to use a learning progression to assess a piece of writing and then asks the students to apply the progression to their own writing to make revisions.  The students have been writing informational texts to teach others about a topic.