Non-Fiction Focus: Plants, Animals and their Habitats This unit will focus on the theme exploring with friends in the neighborhood through a Mo Willems and Kevin Henkes author study. During this unit they will use these texts to ask and answer questions about important details in a story. In addition, an important focus for learning will be on understanding how illustrations support an author's meaning. Students will practice comparing and contrasting two or more characters experiences in a familiar stories. Students will begin to explore informational writing, identifying informational text features. Students will generate ideas, state a topic, write correct information about the topic, focusing on details that are most important. Students will continue to build their foundational reading and writing skills, being able to name all upper and lowercase letters in the alphabet, find and say the b/m/l sound in simple words and name the most common sound for each consonant. Students will be introduced to 21 new sight words and will have opportunities to continue digraph, blend, CVC and word family practice.
Essential Questions
How do illustrations help readers understand a story? What can we learn from comparing and contrasting characters?
RL.K.1. With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text RL.K.2. With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details. RL.K.3. With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story. RL.K.5. Recognize common types of texts (e.g. storybooks, poem). RL.K.6. With prompting and support, name the author and illustrator of a story and define the role of each in telling the story. RL.K.7. With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts RL.K.9. With prompting and support, compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in familiar stories. RL.K.10. Actively engage in group reading activities with purpose and understanding.
RF.K.1. Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print. a. Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page. b. Recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by specific sequences of letters. c. Understand that words are separated by spaces in print. d. Recognize and name all upper-‐ and lowercase letters of the alphabet.
RF.K.2. Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes). a. Recognize and produce rhyming words. b. Count, pronounce, blend, and segment syllables in spoken words. c. Blend and segment onsets and rimes of single-‐syllable spoken words. d, Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-‐phoneme (consonant-‐vowel-‐ consonant, or CVC) words.1 (This does not include CVCs ending with /l/, /r/, or e, Add or substitute individual sounds (phonemes) in simple, one-‐syllable words to make new words f. Words, syllables, or phonemes written in /slashes/ refer to their pronunciation or phonology. Thus, /CVC/ is a word with three phonemes regardless of the number of letters in the spelling of the word g. Demonstrate basic knowledge of letter-‐sound correspondences by producing the primary or most frequent sound for each consonant. h. Associate the long and short sounds with the common spellings (graphemes) for the five major vowels. i. Read common high-‐frequency words by sight (e.g., the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do, does). j. Distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying the sounds of the letters that differ.
W.K.2. Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose informative/explanatory texts in which they name what they are writing about and supply some information about the topic. W.K.5. With guidance and support from adults, respond to questions and suggestions from peers and add details to strengthen writing as needed. W.K.6. With guidance and support from adults, explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, in collaboration with peers.
SL.K.4. Describe familiar people, places, things, and events and with prompting and support, provide additional detail.
L.K.1. Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking. a. Print many upper-‐ and lowercase letters. b. Use frequently occurring nouns and verbs. c. form regular plural nouns orally by adding /s/ or /es/ (e.g. dog, dogs, wish, wishes). L.K.2. Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing a. Capitalize the first word in a sentence and the pronoun I. b. Recognize and name end punctuation. c. Write a letter or letters for most consonant and short vowel sounds (phonemes) d. Spell simple words phonetically, drawing on knowledge of sound-‐letter relationships. L.K.4. Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple meaning words and phrases based on kindergarten reading and content. a. Identify new meanings for familiar words and apply then accurately (e.g., knowing “duck” is a bird and learning the verb “to duck”) b. Use the most frequently occurring inflections and affixes (e.g., -‐ed, -‐s, re-‐, un-‐, pre-‐, -‐ful, -‐less) as a clue to the meaning of the unknown word.
L.K.5. With guidance and support from adults, explore word relationships and nuances in word meanings. a. Sort common objects into categories (e.g., shapes, foods) to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent. b. Demonstrate understanding of frequently occurring verbs and adjectives by relating them to their opposites (antonyms). c. Identify real-‐life connections between words and their use (e.g., note places at school that are colorful). d. Distinguish shades of meaning among verbs describing the same general action (e.g., walk, march, strut, prance) by acting out the meanings. L.K.6. Speak audibly and express thoughts, feelings, and ideas clearly.