In this unit, students will engage in an American Author Study. This unit provides the opportunities for students to develop the skills necessary to ask and answer questions and compare and contrast fictional texts by the same author. In addition, students will continue to develop their writing, focusing on opinion writing along with developing publishing and presentation skills.
Essential Questions
How does asking questions enhance comprehension? How is one author's story elements similar/different across his/her texts?
RL.1.1. Ask and answer questions about key details in a text. RL.1.3. Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details. RL.1.4. Identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses. RL.1.5. Explain major differences between books that tell stories and books that give information, drawing on a wide reading of a range of text types. RL.1.6. Identify who is telling the story at various points in a text. RL.1.7. Use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters, settings, or events. RL.1.9. Compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in stories. RL.1.10. With prompting and support, read prose and poetry of appropriate complexity for grade 1.
RF.1.3. Know and apply grade level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words. a. Know the spelling-‐sound correspondences for common consonant digraphs. b. Decode regularly spelled one-‐syllable words. c. Know final –e and common vowel team conventions for representing long vowel sounds. d. Use knowledge that every syllable must have a vowel sound to determine the number of syllables in a printed word. e. Decode two-‐syllable words following basic patterns by breaking the words into syllables f. Read words with inflectional endings. g. Recognize and read grade-‐ appropriate irregularly spelled words.
RF.1.4. Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension. a. Read on-‐level text with purpose and understanding. b. Read on-‐level text orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings. c. Use context to confirm or self-‐correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary.
W.1.1. Write informative/explanatory pieces, in which they introduce the topic or the name of the book they are writing about, state an opinion, supply a reason for the opinion, and provide some sense of closure. W.1.5. With guidance and support from adults, focus on a topic, respond to questions and suggestions from peers, and add details to strengthen writing as needed. W.1.6. With guidance and support from adults, use a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, in collaboration with peers. W.1.7. Participate in shared research and writing projects (e.g., explore a number of “how-‐to” books on a given topic and use them to write a sequence of instructions). W.1.8. With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.
SL.1.3. Ask and answer questions about what a speaker says in order to gather additional information, or clarify something that is not understood. SL.1.4. Describe people, places, things, and events with relevant details, expressing ideas and feelings clearly. SL.1.5. Add drawings or other visual displays to descriptions when appropriate to clarify ideas, thoughts, and feelings. SL.1.6. Produce complete sentences when appropriate to task and situation. (See grade 1 Language standards 1 and 3 for specific expectations).
L.1.1. Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking. a. Print all upper-‐ and lowercase letters. b. Use common, proper, and possessive nouns. c. Use singular and plural nouns with matching verbs in basic sentences (e.g., He hops; We hop). . d. Use personal, possessive, and indefinite pronouns (e.g., e. Use verbs to convey a sense of past, present, and future (e.g., Yesterday I walked home; Today I walk home; Tomorrow I will walk home). f. Use frequently occurring adjectives. g. Use frequently occurring conjunctions (e.g., and, but, or, so, because) h. Use determiners (e.g., articles, demonstratives). i. Use frequently occurring prepositions (e.g., during, beyond, toward). j. Produce and expand complete simple and compound declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences in response to prompts.
L.1.2. Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing a. Capitalize dates and names of people. b. Use end punctuation for sentences. c. Use conventional spelling for words with common spelling patterns and for frequently occurring irregular words. d. Spell untaught words phonetically, drawing on phonemic awareness and spelling conventions.
L.1.4. Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple meaning words and phrases based on first grade reading and content, choosing flexibly from an array of strategies: a. Use sentence-‐level context as a clue to the meaning of a word or phrase. b. Use frequently occurring affixes as a clue to the meaning of a word. c. Identify frequently occurring root words (e.g., look) and their inflectional forms (e.g., looks, looked, looking).
L.1.6. Use words and phrases acquired through conversations, reading and begin read to, and responding to texts, including using frequently occurring conjunctions to signal relationships (e.g., I named my hamster Nibblet because she nibbles too much because she likes that.)
a. I, me, my, they, them. Their, anyone, everything).