1st and 2nd Grade Common Core English Language Arts Lesson Plans

Use this lesson to help students identify the elements of a fictional text while gaining more knowledge about parts of speech. Use as a stand alone activity or a support lesson for Fairy Tales: Identifying Story Elements.

Get your students moving with this activity that helps them practice their addition skills while having fun hunting for their next problem.

Your young scientists will have tons of fun visiting measurement stations and using tools to measure various objects. They'll even be able to create posters at the end of the activity.

Help your students' story telling abilities grow with this lesson that helps them recount what happened in a story and has them point out key details.

Build words with this fun lesson for emergent readers. Using beads and pipe cleaners, your students will enjoy working with manipulatives to create three- and four-letter words!

In this literary lesson, students use fairy tales to practice identifying character traits. Students are challenged to justify their reasoning using text based support.

Help your ELs practice identifying how their peers are feeling to develop emotions vocabulary and support comprehension. It can be used as a stand-alone lesson or a support lesson.

Use this lesson to help your students learn how to find the main idea and details in a nonfiction text using a graphic organizer for support.

Teach your students to read time to the nearest five minutes by counting by fives! Use this lesson as a stand-alone support lesson for ELs or alongside Tricky Time Telling.

Your students will love to see rhyming trees! They will manipulate letters to form different words that have the same rhyme. This lesson also integrates science and could be used to discuss parts of a plant or a tree.

In this fun blending lesson, students will get a chance to read and spell grade level words. This can be used as a stand-alone lesson or support for the Cooking Up Blends lesson plan.

Your students will love learning all about the playful characters in a classic read-aloud text while digging into what makes characters unique. Use as a stand-alone or support lesson for the How to Analyze a Character lesson plan.

Students will learn how to identify story elements and create a short and sweet summary. They will fill out a graphic organizer and solidify their understanding by creating illustrations to show major plot points that they find themselves!

Explore a day in the life of a pencil! Your students will practice different points of view by thinking outside the box and writing as though they are something else.

This winter-themed lesson plan, which incorporates the book Tree of Cranes by Allen Say, teaches students about Japanese traditions and customs. They will review the basic elements of a narrative story, and then write their own narratives about a special event or moment in their life.

Engage students in reading grade-level texts by making and testing predictions. Your students will be excited to read on to find out if their predictions are correct!

Do you have students who are constantly asking what, who, where, why, how, and when? It's your turn to ask now! Have them read various stories and ask them to answer these questions in this lesson.

This lesson will provide your ELs with support as they learn about nouns and practice retelling a story with a 5 W's graphic organizer. This lesson can be used as a stand alone activity or a support lesson.

What do the letters A, E, I, O, and U have in common? They're all featured in this engaging reading lesson. Give your young learners a chance to play a version of Red Light, Green Light that doubles as a vowel review.

What makes a poem a poem? And what makes a story a story? In this lesson, students learn to distinguish between different types of texts while analyzing the sentences and words they encounter.

When reading, we all encounter unknown words at times. But how do we figure them out? In this lesson, students learn how to become a “human dictionary” by using a variety of strategies to figure out the meaning of unknown words.

ELs will get a chance to practice their listening and reading comprehension skills as they answer questions about the key details in a read-aloud text. Use as a stand-alone or pre-lesson for the Questions for Comprehension lesson plan.

Ask an important question this month: What does an activist do? This engaging lesson can be used leading up to Martin Luther King Jr. Day (and year-round). It supports students in understanding what it means to be an activist and how Martin Luther King Jr. used collaborative action to change the world and speak out against oppression. Perfect for first graders and second graders, this activity explores word meaning and other reading and writing skills.

Second graders love field trips and sharing their opinions! This fun lesson combines both, as students must convince their teacher to take them on a field trip by practicing their opinion writing and using paragraph structure.

This lesson will help students identify the author's point of view and purpose for writing an informational text.

In this lesson, your students will explore reading with technology with "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." Students will use a graphic organizer to reflect on this story.

This engaging lesson teaches students about the famous author Faith Ringgold. Students will explore two pieces of literature, comparing and contrasting story elements, then write opinion pieces to illustrate which book they liked best.

Through creative and engaging activities, your students will explore and learn about landforms. In this lesson, they will make their own mini dictionary of landforms.

Mae Jemison was the first African American female astronaut to enter space. Use the Get to Know Mae Jemison lesson plan to learn more about this famous scientist. Children will then read and write about her, and create their own paper rocket.