1st - 3rd Grade Common Core English Language Arts Lesson Plans

In this lesson, students will use their creativity, a graphic organizer, and a fun story to learn about character analysis.

Give your class the "write" stuff! In this lesson, your students will learn to master combining sentences using sentences with the same subjects or predicates.

Help your students absorb the details of a text and make inferences about what they read with the strategy of close reading. By reading closely, students will become better able to understand complex themes and nuances in a text.

Get your students excited about possessive pronouns with this fun lost-and-found inspired lesson. By talking about items that belong to themselves and their classmates, kids be gain a better understanding of denoting possession.

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!

Verbs are the only kind of word that have tenses. Some of them are standard and easy to learn, while others are irregular and tricky. This lesson will review verb tense changes that follow the regular pattern and those oddballs that don't.

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

Pronouns will no longer be a mystery to your students as they discover how to position and use them! In this lesson, students will explore the form and use of demonstrative and reflexive pronouns, clarifying the meaning in context.

Earth Day is a time for raising awareness and appreciation for our environment. It’s also a time for using correct punctuation! With this lesson, your students will use correct punctuation, like commas, quotation marks, and apostrophes.

Help your students avoid the dreaded sentence fragment with this lesson that gives young writers the building blocks they need to succeed in English class.

Change is inevitable, even for story characters! In this lesson, your students will determine how a character changes throughout a story by focusing on the character’s dialogue and actions.

Teach your students to edit peer writing with a three-step process that will improve their writing skills and overall confidence. In this lesson, students will practice editing short pieces of writing using specific criteria.

Friendly letters are under construction! In this lesson, students will learn the unique parts of a friendly letter as they practice the art of writing their own friendly letters.

There is great wonder in building things and taking them apart. Use this grammar lesson with your students to teach them how to construct and deconstruct contractions while correctly using an apostrophe.

This lesson challenges young learners to add dialogue to their writing. Students will love using their creativity to write personal narratives.

Students will become sentence construction gurus as they learn to craft more sophisticated sentences. Specifically, young writers will use subordinating conjunctions to combine dependent and independent clauses to craft complex sentences.

Do your students have strong opinions? This lesson, which features a bunch of fun essay-building exercises, provides an outlet for young writers to express their opinions.

Familiarize your young scholars with declarative and imperative sentences using this simple English lesson. Students will love learning about periods through a series of sentence-writing exercises.

Cats are the best! Pizza is better! My teacher rules! In Fact or Opinion: Part 1, your students will combine reading and writing to learn about the differences between facts and opinions and how those differences are communicated.

Fully adaptable, this lesson can be used to to highlight African American leaders, famous women, veterans, or any other group of individuals who have acted heroically and have positively influenced our nation!

In this lesson, students will practice "reading" pictures. They will look at the details in pictures in order to make predictions about what happens in a text. This lesson can be used alone or with the Predicting Pictures lesson plan.

Mae Jemison was the first African American female astronaut to enter space! Use the Who Is Mae Jemison? lesson plan to get to know this prominent scientist and entrepreneur. Students will read about Mae and then answer questions about her.

Use this lesson to help your ELs explore adjectives and how we can use them to describe things. This lesson can stand alone or be used as a pre-lesson for the Similes that Describe ME! lesson.

Use this lesson to help your ELs understand main idea and supporting details. They'll analyze non-fiction word, sentence, and paragraph structures. It can be a stand-alone lesson or a support lesson to the In Search of Main Ideas lesson.

In this lesson, your students will go through the writing process to write about their perfect pets and then make a 3-D version of this pet, mount the final draft, and display it.

Every student is unique. This lesson emphasizes that uniqueness by having young learners use similes to share some of the traits that make them special. It features Quick as a Cricket by Audrey Wood and a fantastic storyboard exercise.

Boost your students’ writing with instruction on book titles! A title should be catchy and inclusive of the content of a book. Use this lesson to teach your students the art and mechanics of writing terrific titles.

Help students learn about descriptive writing with this engaging lesson. Your class will learn to show character emotions though the “show, don’t tell” writing technique with videos, practice writing, and class participation.

Help your class grasp the concept of "main idea" with this fun, hands-on lesson. Students will dive into mystery bags full of supportive detail clues to determine the main idea of each bag.