ELA Unit Overview
Kindergarten, Quarter 1, 3-5 Weeks
My StoryUnifying Concept: Everyone Has a Story to Tell / Reading Focus: Literature / Writing Focus: Narrative
Overview: The development of a positive self-concept or healthy self-esteem is extremely important to the happiness and success of children. By building self esteem, students are able to act independently, assume responsibility, take pride in their accomplishments, tolerate frustration and attempt new tasks/challenges, handle positive and negative emotions, and offer assistance to others. In this unit the students will enhance their self esteem and build confidence about themselves and their abilities. The students will explore their strengths, differences and identify their personal qualities'. The students will expand their perceptions and expectations of a sense of security, belonging and purpose. The development of self esteem reflects how we act and feel. Students will also be exposed to their five senses and howthese senses help them learn about their world.
Purpose:
To interact with grade level appropriate literature focusing on multicultural connections from text to text, text to themselves, and text to the world
To develop personal independence and build self-esteem, by exploring who they are personally and what is important and special about them
To use personal experiences to write about feelings, and family
To use the 5 senses to make observations about their environment
Enduring Understandings:
Through literature, readers develop an understanding of themselves and others. / Essential Questions:
1. What do I know about me?
2. Why am I important?
3. When I learn about myself, how do I learn about others?
4. How is my body useful to sense the world?
Target Standards are emphasized during the quarter and used in a formal assessment to evaluate student mastery.
Highly-Leveraged1 arethe most essential for students to learn because they have endurance (knowledge and skills are relevant throughout a student's lifetime); leverage (knowledge and skills are used across multiple content areas); and essentiality (knowledge and skills are necessary for success in future courses or grade levels).
K.RL.1With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.
K.RL.2With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details.
K.RL.3With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.
K.W.3 Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate a single event or several loosely linked events, tell about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provide a reaction to what happened.
Supporting are related standards that support the highly leveraged standards in and across grade levels.
K.W.1 Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose opinion pieces in which they tell a reader the topic or the name of the book they are writing about and state an opinion or preference about the topic or book (e.g., My favorite book is . . .).
K.W.4a With guidance and support from adults, produce functional writing (e.g., classroom rules, experiments, notes/messages, friendly letters, labels, graphs/tables) in which the development and organization are appropriate to task and purpose.
K.L.5a Sort common objects into categories (e.g., shapes, foods) to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent.
Selected Readings of Complex Texts
Extended/Short Texts:
From Head to Toe, Eric Carle
Giraffes Can’t Dance, Giles Andreae
Kissing Hand, The Audrey Penn
My Five Senses, Aliki
Wemberly Worried, Kevin Henkes
What is Special About Me, Mama?,Kristina Evan / Multicultural Adoptions:
Shades of People, Shelly Rotner
Color of Us, The, Karen Katz
Additional Instructional Resources
Electronic Resources and Alternative Media:
5 Senses Sing-A-Long ( , Mr. R.'s Songs for Teaching
Everybody Has a Name by Jean Warren (
From Head toToe (), Eric Carle
Giraffes Can’t Dance, ( Giles Andreae
If You're Happy And You Know It
It's Okay To Be Different ( )
Learn All About The Five Senses ( Youtube video
The Kissing Hand () ,Audrey Penn
Wemberly Worried,( ) Kevin Henkes
Performance Assessments
Formative Assessments:
Formative assessments will be administered once or twice a week by having students respond to text selections through various text types (e.g., narrative, opinion, informative/explanatory) and modalities of writing (e.g., digital story telling, journaling, letters, poetry).
Participation in discussions about self esteem, a sense of belonging, being unique and diversity
Participation in a narrative writing response to the following questions:
What do I know about me?
Why am I important?
When I learn about myself, how do I learn about others?
How is my body useful to sense the world?
Identify and differentiate the different body parts that use the five senses by their attributes. / Summative Assessments:
Students and families will create an All About Me Poster/Collage
Students will create a Family Coat of Arms Project
Students will create a Class Book Project identifying the 5 Senses and their functions/attributes
1This definition for highly-leveraged standards was adapted from the “power standard” definition on the website of Millis Public Schools, K-12, in Massachusetts, USA.
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