📚 1st grade English Language Arts: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. 🧩Blend It

   Blending sounds into words (s-u-n makes sun), counting the sounds in a word and hearing the last sound. These listening skills are the base of reading and spelling.

2. 🍎Short Vowels

   Hearing the short vowel in the middle of words like cat, bed, pig, dog and sun, and filling in the missing vowel to spell the word.

3. 🏠Word Families

   Words that share an ending, like cat, hat and bat. Once children know one word in a family, they can read and spell many more by changing the first sound.

4. 🐑Sh, Ch, Th

   Letter pairs that make one sound (sh, ch, th) at the start and end of words like ship, cheese and tooth.

5. 👀Sight Words

   Common words like said, was, they and where that are tricky to sound out. Children practice finding, using and spelling them so they can read them at a glance.

6. ✏️Sentences

   Starting sentences and names with a capital letter, ending with a period or question mark, telling whole sentences from parts, counting words and finding naming words.

7. 📖Story Time

   Reading short stories, then naming who is in them and where they happen, and putting the events in order. Reading the story aloud together and talking about it helps a lot!

8. 🎨Describing Words

   Opposites (hot and cold) and describing words that tell how something looks, feels, tastes or sounds, including finding the describing word in a sentence.

9. 🧦More Than One

   Plurals: adding -s to a naming word means more than one (one cat, two cats). Stretch questions add -es to words like box and fox.

10. 💬Kinds of Sentences

    Knowing a telling sentence from a question, a command and an exclamation, choosing the end mark, and seeing sentences with two ideas joined.

11. 🕵️Think It Through

    Reading a short story, finding the main idea and details, and using clues to work out what is not said.

12. 📺Messages All Around

    Children look at everyday messages, like signs, ads, cards and videos, and practice asking who made them, why, and how they make us feel. This is the media literacy part of the standards.

13. 📚Story or Facts?

    Children practice telling books that tell stories from books that give information, and noticing what pictures add to the words.

14. 📖Reading Smart

    Practices thinking before and while reading: using what you already know, predicting what happens next, making connections to your own life, using headings and pictures, telling kinds of texts apart and learning topic words.

15. 🤔True, Pretend and Opinions

    Practices telling what could be true from what is make-believe, noticing that people see the same thing differently, seeing people like us in books, and giving an opinion with a reason.

16. ✏️Plan and Write

    Practices planning writing by drawing and talking, putting ideas in order, grouping ideas that belong together, showing feelings in writing, improving after feedback, and knowing different kinds of writing.

17. 💭Feelings, Senses and Reasons

    Your child finds words that show feelings and the five senses, picks the detail an author gives to support an idea, and chooses joining words such as and, but, so, or and because.

18. 🔍Word Clues

    Your child works out the meaning of words with more than one meaning from the sentence, finds the base word in words like jumping and looked, and notices what makes a sentence: a capital first word and an end mark.

19. 🔎Respond and Find Out

    Your child chooses ways to respond to a story or poem (a drawing, a play, a new ending), asks questions, picks a source to answer them and thinks of ways to remember and share what they learn.