English Language Arts 1

A message is anything that tells somebody something: a storybook, a shopping list, a stop sign and a birthday card are all messages, even though they look very different.

A story tells you what happened to someone.

A book's cover shows its title, the name of the book, and its author, the person who wrote it: on a cover that says “Max Goes Skating” by Lee Chan, the title is Max Goes Skating and the author is Lee Chan.

The title is usually the biggest words on the front cover.

Every story has three parts in order, a beginning, a middle and an ending, and true stories have them too, like the story of your first time skating.

A story about a dragon and a true story about losing your tooth both start somewhere, have things happen, and then finish.

Real information can be shared in different forms: a story about the day you lost a tooth, the steps for feeding the class fish, and a list of what you saw at the pond can all tell true things.

Non-fiction is not only big books of facts.

A picture can be a whole message with no words at all: a picture book with no words can tell a story, page by page, just with its pictures.

Look at a picture of a boy holding a broken kite and crying.

Good listening is something you do, not only being quiet: you turn toward the speaker, keep your body calm, and let them finish.

Listening takes attention, which means keeping your mind on what the speaker is saying.

Different places need different volumes: a library needs a whisper, a classroom an indoor voice, and a soccer field a big outdoor voice.

In a quiet place, a loud voice bothers people who are reading, working or resting.

An oral story is told out loud instead of read from a book, and many are handed down from grandparents to parents to children, which is called an oral tradition: a story your grandma heard from her own grandma, and now tells you, is part of one.

Long before there were books, people shared stories by telling them.

You were really listening if you can tell one thing the speaker said: after a friend talks about her new baby brother, you can say that he cries at night.

Listening is active: your brain works the whole time, picking up words and making pictures of them.

When the whole class needs to hear you, your voice has to be bigger and clearer than when you talk to one friend beside you: telling the class about your new kitten needs a voice that reaches the back row.

Talking to one friend at your table only needs a small voice.

When you meet a word you do not know, the picture and the rest of the sentence usually tell you enough to keep reading: in “The puppy was so sleepy that it yawned”, the sentence and a picture of a puppy with its mouth wide open show what yawned means.

New words are everywhere in books, and nobody stops to look up every one.

A synonym is a word that means almost the same as another word: happy and glad, big and huge, and cold and chilly are synonyms.

Many new words are like old friends wearing different clothes.

The picture is a clue to a hard word: if the sentence says the dog was drenched and the picture shows it dripping wet, drenched must mean very wet.

In a picture book, the words and the picture tell the same story, so the picture is a free clue.

A word can be replaced by a synonym to make a sentence more interesting: “The dog is big” becomes “The dog is enormous”, and the meaning stays the same.

Writers swap plain words for synonyms to paint a clearer picture.

The words around a new word are the next clue: “She carried the enormous box with both arms” tells you that enormous means very big, even with no picture.

Other words in the sentence hold clues.

Two words rhyme when they end with the same sound: cat and hat, sun and fun; it is the beginnings that are different.

Say a pair out loud and listen only to the last part.

A compound word can be split into the two words it is made of: “football” splits into foot and ball, and “rainbow” into rain and bow.

Listen for two words you know inside the big word.

Rhyme is about sound, not spelling: “cow” and “low” both end with the letter w, and they do not rhyme.

Say them and listen: cow ends with the sound in ouch, and low ends with the sound in oh.

Two words said together quickly can blend into a compound word: “cow” and “boy” make cowboy, and “sand” and “box” make sandbox.

Say the first word, then the second, then say them again closer together until there is no gap.

A rhyme is made by keeping the ending and changing the first sound: -ig gives big, dig, fig, pig and wig.

Hold the ending in your head and try different sounds at the front.

The English alphabet has 26 letters, from a to z, and the letters stand for the sounds in spoken words.

Twenty-six letters are enough to write every English word, because the same letters are used again and again in different orders.

Each vowel has a short sound: a in cat, e in bed, i in pig, o in hot and u in sun.

Short vowel sounds are quick, and they are in many three-letter words.

Every letter has two forms, an upper case (capital) letter and a lower case (small) letter: A and a, B and b, and G and g are the same letters.

Some pairs look almost the same, like C and c, O and o, and S and s.

A long vowel sound says the name of its letter: the a in cake, the e in tree, the i in bike, the o in boat and the u in cube.

When a vowel says its own name, it is long.

Some letters look alike but face different ways: b has its bump on the right, d has its bump on the left, and p and q are a pair like them.

Here is a trick for b and d: make two fists with your thumbs pointing up and your knuckles facing each other.

Recognizing letters quickly and correctly helps reading: when you know m, a and p in a snap, all your thinking goes into putting map together.

Your brain can only do so much at once.

Letter speed grows with practice: a mixed row of letters, like s, m, b, d, t and p, gets named a little faster each day while every one stays right.

Practise with letter cards, a letter chart or the signs around you.

Blending gets faster with practice until a three-sound word, like sat or fog, is read in one smooth go.

At first you say each sound and then blend.

Blending speeds up when the first two sounds are joined before the last one is added: sa, then sat; fo, then fog.

Instead of holding three separate sounds, join the first two right away: /s/ and /a/ make sa.

High-frequency words are the words you see most often: the, and, a, to, is, you and said turn up on almost every page.

A small group of words makes up a big part of everything you read.

Retelling means telling a story again in your own words, in the order it happened: in a story about a lost mitten, the mitten is lost first and found last.

A retelling has three parts: how things were, what went wrong, and how it came out.

Books read aloud can use richer words than everyday talk: a story might say “The giant bellowed” where you would say “The man yelled.”

Book language is often fancier than the way people talk at home.

Chunking breaks a word into parts you already know: sandbox is sand and box, and jumping is jump and -ing.

Long words often hide shorter parts.

A prediction is a smart guess about what will happen, made from clues: a story called “Max and the Lost Mitten” will probably be about Max looking for a mitten.

Predicting makes you a detective.

Order words help you sequence the events of a story: first the little red hen finds some wheat, next she plants it, then she cuts it, and finally she bakes bread.

Sequencing means putting events in the order they happened.

Printing puts real letters on the page: the word dog needs the letters d, o and g, not shapes that only look like writing.

Wavy lines across a page look like writing but say nothing.

A written message fits its audience and its purpose: a note asking your teacher to borrow a book is polite and clear, while a note to your best friend can be silly.

Before you write, ask who will read it and why you are writing.

Ideas for writing come from your own life: people like your grandpa, places like the rink, and things like your new boots can all start a piece of writing.

You do not need a big adventure to have something to write about.

Research means finding true facts about real things: learning what beavers eat, from a book and from a park ranger, is research.

When you research, you are a fact detective.

Letters come in three sizes: tall letters like b, d, h, k and l reach the top line, small letters like a, c, e, o and s stay in the middle, and tail letters like g, j, p, q and y hang below the line.

Lined paper helps you place each letter.

Every sentence starts with a capital letter, and the capital is the signal that a new sentence has begun: “The dog ran. It was fast.”

A reader uses the capital, together with the mark at the end, to see where each sentence starts and stops.

A sentence tells a complete thought, whether you say it or write it: “My sister found a ladybug.” is complete, while “found a ladybug” leaves out who.

Listen to a group of words and ask whether it makes sense all by itself.

A word family shares a spelling pattern that looks the same and sounds the same: cat, hat, mat and flat are all in the -at family.

Once you can spell one word in a family, you can spell the others by changing the first letter or letters, while the ending stays the same: -at, -ig, -op, -ell.

A sentence needs a stopping mark as well as a capital: “The dog ran it was fast” is a muddle, and “The dog ran. It was fast.” is two clear sentences.

The capital opens a sentence and the end mark closes it, so they work as a pair.

A telling sentence tells something and ends with a period: “I have a cat.” and “It is raining.” are telling sentences.

Telling sentences give information or share a thought, and most sentences in a story are telling sentences.