Clair Hoey's List: Common Core - Kindergarten

How does the story connect to your own life, another text your have read, or the world around you? In this lesson, students will read books about families and make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections using those books. Students gain a deeper understanding of a text when they make authentic connections. Beginning with a read-aloud of Donald Crews' Bigmama's, the instructor introduces and models the strategy of making connections. Read-alouds of The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats and The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant are followed by activities that help students learn to apply each type of text connection when responding to texts. After sharing and discussing connections in a Think-Pair-Share activity, students plan and write a piece describing a personal connection to one of the texts.

After listening to the beginning of a story, students use details in the text, personal experience, and prior knowledge to predict the way the story will end. To support their predictions, the class discusses the plot elements of the book to the stopping point as well as experiences they have had with other books in the genre and in their own lives. Students individually create illustrations of the story’s ending that reflect their predictions and share these illustrations with the class before the entire book is read again. After the entire book has been read, students compare their endings to the ending in the original story.

Although phonological awareness is important for early reading comprehension, other skills are equally important as students develop their reading abilities. Designed to facilitate successful early reading for kindergarten students, this lesson teaches the acquisition of vocabulary, one-to-one matching, left-to-right directionality, and awareness of rhyme. Students study these important aspects of reading using a shared exploration of a poem that includes peer interaction, hands-on experience with print, and a collaborative examination of new and familiar words.

This games provides practice in phonological awareness with beginning sounds.

From PBS the Quiet Machine develops a student phonological awareness skills of beginning sounds.

This website contains a "Dolch Kit" with many practice activities for students to use as they learn the Dolch, 220 high frequency words

This online activity is designed for beginning and struggling readers to help them recognize word patterns and learn about onset and rime. Students are first asked to select a vowel, and are then presented with a series of words to sort into short-vowel w

PBS LearningMedia™ is the go-to destination for instant access to tens of thousands of classroom-ready, digital resources including videos, games, audio clips, photos, lesson plans, and more! You can search, save, and share with ease. Best of all, PBS LearningMedia is free for educators.

Although this site does have items for sale, it also has free little books, poetry and links to other good resources.

Six lesson that support narrative writing.

As a class, students read the wordless picture book Pancakes for Breakfast by Tomie dePaola, telling the story themselves as they read the pictures. Next, they draw a picture of a person doing something, and tell the story of their picture. After sharing and discussing each other's pictures, students draw a second picture to show what might happen next. Working at their own pace, they continue the story by drawing pictures showing the problem and solution. When all the pictures are complete, students put them in order and write or dictate the story that goes with them. Finally, students create an accordion book from their drawings and text.

This lesson invites pre-school through first grade students to share what they know about letters and sounds with a small group of their peers, and also gives teachers an opportunity to assess that knowledge in a more meaningful context than traditional “screening” sessions achieve. Working with name cards written by themselves or an adult, students share observations about their names and the names of their classmates, such as similarities and differences in spelling. Extensions of the lesson are appropriate for more experienced and knowledgeable primary-aged students.

Learning to recognize letters is an integral part of most kindergarten programs. The challenge is to keep students' interest while practicing until they are fluent. This lesson meets that challenge using a variety of activities. Your students will apply their knowledge of letters and letter sounds as they play games and interact with letters online, using what they see and learn to create their own ABC book.

What makes a shadow? Do shadows change? Can a person escape his or her shadow? These and many other questions provide the framework for students to explore their prior knowledge about shadows as fiction, informational texts, and poetry. In this lesson, language arts skills are linked to the learning of science in a literacy-based approach to the study of shadows. Through discussion of literature on shadows and the use of questioning techniques to probe prior knowledge, students begin to explore scientific concepts and develop and test hypotheses. After studying shadows, recording observations of shadows, and hearing poetry about shadows, students create their own poetic response incorporating their knowledge. The inclusion of poetry in the lesson encourages aesthetic appreciation of scientific phenomena and invites students to observe the world around them from new perspectives.

This lesson describes small-group, guided writing lessons, which are taught in four steps for students who are in need of extra support. Students learn how to communicate information of interest, stimulated by discussion of Nicola Davies' Bat Loves the Night and several websites. Students learn three sets of strategies for writing: (1) engaging in writing with fluent, sustained attention, (2) writing informative titles, and (3) adding enough information to communicate clearly.

Learning to recognize rhyming patterns in language is an essential skill for emergent readers. As students manipulate words and sounds to create simple rhymes, they become aware of word and letter patterns that will help them develop decoding skills. In this lesson, students become familiar with 12 rhyming pairs of one-syllable words as they create rhyming lyrics to known songs ("Down by the Bay"), give rhyming words for a given keyword in a poem, and interact with their peers to find rhyming pairs of word cards. Students then demonstrate their knowledge through an individual assessment exercise.

The study of onset and rime is crucial to the development of reading and writing in K-2 students. This lesson incorporates literature, independent and cooperative learning, critical thinking, and hands-on activities to engage students in learning the ig rime. Students explore books and magazines for words that have the ig rime, in addition to brainstorming their own words. Furthermore, assessment is included as students incorporate learned words in context and isolation. This lesson can be adapted to teach various word patterns and could be used for basic ELL instruction.

This lesson uses familiar words from The Gingerbread Man to help early readers learn letter–sound correspondence. Students begin with a teacher-conducted shared reading of the story. As students listen, they read the words in the refrain along with the teacher. After the third hearing of the story, students choose their favorite words from the story and identify the sounds that the letters make in the words. Students conclude the lesson by using the newly learned words in an online story of their own creation.

This lesson provides a framework for introducing students to short-vowel word families. Focusing first on the a family, students work together and individually to learn the word families -at, -an, -ap, and -ack. Teacher modeling is used to introduce the word sort, inviting students to compare, contrast, and reflect on these four word families. Students then work with a partner to practice sorting and reading words with increased speed and accuracy. As their skills and confidence improve, students are asked to sort, read, and write words individually. These lessons can also be adapted to teach other short-vowel word families.

This lesson is designed to introduce primary students to the importance of asking questions before, during, and after listening to a story. In this lesson, using the story The Mitten by Jan Brett, students learn how to become good readers by asking questions. This is the first lesson in a set of questioning lessons designed for primary grades.