Grade K Teacher's Resource Guide

This Teacher’s Resource Guide contains lessons and tools to move your students through both reading and writing expository text. The instructional path is clear and easy-to-follow, supplementing your language arts instruction with resources designed to hone in on expository text structures and text features. Use this guide to inform your instruction, from speaking and listening to reading and then making the writing connection. Each student book has pages dedicated to instruction of the critical analysis of expository texts. Each lesson includes: • suggestions for speaking and listening, helping students build on others’ ideas and express their own ideas clearly. • questions and activities designed to get students thinking about the topic. • suggestions for reading so students think deeply about the topic and the ways in which the student authors develop them. • tips in the side column that focus on author’s craft and conventions, allowing students to consider these elements of writing and then incorporate them into their own writing. • prompts for deeper thinking about the book with a variety of options for responses. • a variety of options for writing in response to reading the book. This guide also includes an entire section devoted to writing. As you guide students through the writing process, you will find a lesson devoted to each stage of the process, from identifying the features of expository writing to gathering thoughts and drafting all the way to sharing writing and assessing the final product. • Writing lessons follow the gradual release of responsibility model, with the teacher leading the students in each step of the writing process before giving students the opportunity to practice those strategies independently. Students examine the mentor text to notice features. • Some lessons include a features chart. Be sure to create this features chart and share it with students throughout the process to keep them focused. • After watching the teacher modeling strategies, students are given the opportunity to explore the text or writing process with guidance. • Each lesson ends with an opportunity for students to reflect on their learning and summarize what they learned. Finally, this guide offers a variety of tools—rubrics, graphic organizers, and checklists—to guide student work and enable them to think and write independently.