First Grade Essentials

This graphic organizer really helps my first graders organizer their thoughts.

This organizer really helps my first graders organizer their thoughts.

Graphic organizer designed to help students organizer their thoughts before and during their writing of a fairy tale

I wanted to give my young writers a little more direction for letter writing early in the year. It's worked well so far.

This rubric has helped my parents and students so much. Knowing exactly what's expected is so beneficial.

Poetry has always been a difficult area for me to teach. After a couple of years researching various teaching strategies I finally developed my own unit. I've just finished teaching it and it was amazing. My kids' products were so much better and I enjoyed teaching!

After going through multiple documents for writing conferences I decided that the simpler the better. This one has been working great!

A three day close reading lesson for the book, Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch There are also suggestions for small group instruction.

This power point was designed as an introduction to plants. It's basically a 5 day lesson plan. It has titles of literature to accompany each day; these books would need to be purchased. The power points are available for editing. They are very simple and to the point.

This is my layout of the year. ELA, Science, and Social Studies are included. (I didn't map out math because our district handles that for us.) I tried to correlate subject areas when possible. ELA standards are not included because I didn't think I would be likely to follow them anyway...as I have to move based on my students needs. Although my students are free to write about whatever they choose, I did include possible ideas for my own modeling purposes.

This is a practical close reading lesson with well prepared questions that meet all of the literature standards. Each question is correlated to a standard. I also notated the level of difficulty of each question based on Webb's Depth of Knowledge.

This year we're going to have a Frozen Christmas Party. All of my party stations are based on activities that match song titles. I had lots of fun creating them and can't wait for the party. I will have parents who volunteer to work each station. The kids will be split into groups and they will rotate through each station. Station descriptions are given in this document.

This made comparing and contrasting a little easier when initially teaching the concept.

We use this graphic organizer all the time. It's great to use in all subject areas.

This has helped my students and parents so much! Knowing exactly what's expected is very beneficial for parents.

My students do an amazing job retelling nonfiction after a couple of weeks worth of explicit lessons using this graphic organizer.

This is a document that has every volunteer needed and item needed for my entire year. You'll see the type of parties I host as well as the items that I need for them. You'll see other special things that go on throughout the year too. Giving the document to my room mom and having her contact parents to fill the needs has saved me so much time over the years! This document can easily be edited to meet the needs of your room.

Before I have my students compare characters they have to complete a character traits web. This makes comparing and contrasting much easier.

Sort words as sh words or s words.

This rubric has helped my parents and students so much. Knowing exactly what's expected is so beneficial.