Understanding how to pronounce the short I sound, such as in pill and film, is important for first graders encountering words they don't know. This guided lesson teaches kids all about the Short I sound, and provides lots of examples of short I words. Targeted practice like this helps to reinforce kids' understanding of short vowel sounds and boosts phonemic awareness, upon which lifelong reading skills are based.

Words are like legos - they can have interchangeable parts. In this unit students will study the construction of words including roots, prefixes and suffixes. Students will also explore how to modify words to make them possessive, a different part of speech and adjust to signify singular and plural. Understanding the basic building blocks of words, will increase students’ vocabulary, improve their spelling and add strategies for decoding unfamiliar words.

Letter writing is a very engaging and authentic way to learn formatting, punctuation and grammar. The activities in this unit should be learned in tandem with actual letter writing to aunts, uncles or other special far-away people. That way, students can learn and practice the letter writing skills and then apply them in their own letters. It would be especially rich to include their thoughts about books they are reading.