November is almost here, so it's time to plan those November Read Aloud Lessons. I have tried to take all of the work and time out of planning these lessons for you by creating the Interactive Read Aloud Lessons curriculum for first grade. This month incorporates elections, Thanksgiving, and more while covering your ELA comprehension standards. The thing that I love most about an interactive read aloud is that you can hit so many standards at once within a short amount of time, from literature to speaking and listening to vocabulary. I even tie in a little grammar with the included mentor sentences. In this post, we will cover what read alouds you will be using to teach those standards, as well as everything included in the November curriculum pack.
This month's books for the read aloud lessons are...
(This post does contain affiliate links if you purchase books from this post at no additional cost to you.)
Read alouds allow us to teach a broad range of standards. You will find that each week's read aloud will cover several standards, but we will focus a little more strongly on one each week for assessment purposes.
Each read aloud comes with a printable anchor chart. I show you how to print it as a poster on a regular printer. I include the above components on a focus board in my classroom to refer to throughout the week. We cover one book per week with an assessment on Friday.
There are typically 3-4 vocabulary words per story, since that is typically the research-based recommendation. The Duck for President story also has a paired text, so we have a total of six for both stories. I have a routine that I go through each day with the vocabulary words. You will get a card that lists out the steps of the routine, along with slides that have the definition, a sentence, a quick student task, and an image to match the word. We go through these slides each day before the story.
Posters are included for the focus standards, along with all comprehension posters from previous read alouds. I always post these on my ELA focus board.
Five days of lesson plans for each story are included. Before reading, I do a quick mini lessons, which is scripted in the lesson plan. We then go into reading the story. I read the whole story on day one and then only the portions needed for the daily task on the following days. You will ask students text-dependent questions as you read. These cover the different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. I always stop and have students turn and talk when answering the question so that everyone has a chance to be engaged. We then discuss it as a whole group.
You can print the questions on sticky notes and place them in your book. I like to cut them apart and place them on the pages that I will stop to ask the question. This ensures you are always prepared each day.
After reading the story, students complete a daily task independently based on the mini lesson and the text read that day. The daily tasks will work up to a culminating task at the end of the week. The culminating task will be used as one assessment; I include a scoring rubric that you can attach to the task so students and parents understand the score given for the task and what was expected.
Duck for President is great for election week. We use this book along with its paired text, Let's Vote On It, to teach the difference between books that tell stories and books that give information. The daily tasks for Duck for President cover the features that make a book a fictional book and vice versa for the nonfiction text. On Friday, there is a fun culminating task in which students are given a book. They have to determine what type of book it is and prove their thinking with text evidence. They add all of this to a cute voting button craft. I call it an Election Book Party!
Turkey Trouble is perfect for Thanksgiving week. We cover making predictions, as well as our focus standard of describing the characters, setting, and plot using key details from the text. They will make a turkey craft describing each on a feather. The culminating task is creating a timeline of major events from the story.
Squanto's Journey tells the story of Squanto using his perspective of the events of the first Thanksgiving. It's the anchor text of the week, but you will also need a book told from the pilgrims' point of view. I used the story, The Pilgrims' First Thanksgiving to compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of two sets of characters. Students will make a list of events that happened to the characters and use those lists to compare and contrast on the culminating task.
With The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, we work on identifying point of view. We look at Wolf's point of view and how he feels in the anchor text. We also learn what text features to look for when identifying from whose point of view a story is told. In first grade, students should be able to identify who is telling the story at various points in a text. You will want to bring in a paired text that is a different variation of the three pigs story. Students will have to determine the point of view at various points and provide text evidence to explain their thinking on the culminating task. I have also included a quick STEM activity to pair with the stories.
Not only will you use the culminating task as an assessment, but there will also be a comprehension test covering the focus standard. You will then have two grades you can use for that standard. There are four multiple choice questions and one short response question.
I like to incorporate a mentor sentence each day from the story that ties in the language standards we have covered. This really ties everything in your ELA block together.
Not only do you get everything I described above, you also get the digital slides I use to guide my lessons. You can see a peek below of everything included in just one lesson. You get these for each day and each lesson. You literally just have to print the student materials and display the slides. I wanted everything to be ready to go for you so that you have to do no planning. I would ,of course, go over what I am teaching before the lesson, so that I am prepared and knowledgable of that day's content.
You can find this month's lessons HERE or by clicking on any of the images in this post. Thanks, as always, for stopping by!
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