My Amazing Body Teacher's Manual (Grade 1)

Students explore the topic of the amazing human body through reading and discussing the three texts: Me and My Amazing Body by Joan Sweeney, The Skeleton Inside You by Phillip Palestrina, and The Busy Body Book by Lizzy Rockwell. Students engage in text-discussions to develop their comprehension of the texts and to consider features that support comprehension.

• Three informational texts
• 3-6 weeks instruction
• Opinion writing

Materials include Teacher's Manual only.

What is this unit about?

The Common Core State Standards at the elementary level require teachers to be mindful of the balance of informational to literary texts used during the course of the school day and to intentionally build students’ academic vocabulary and knowledge about the world through engagement with informational texts. This unit and its lesson plans are designed to assist teachers to use rich text discussions to engage students in thinking, talking, and writing about their amazing human bodies. This introduction to anatomy will help children learn new and important parts of their body, what those parts do, and what the children need to do to grow up strong and healthy. In addition, students will learn about a few features of informational texts that authors use to assist readers to understand and remember important new words about their topic.

In Me and My Amazing Body by Joan Sweeney, children will be introduced to their basic anatomy and look at the body parts that function under their skin. They will understand what these body parts do and why they need them in order to breathe, work, and play. The second text, The Skeleton Inside You by Philip Balestrino, builds on what the children have already learned about their bones. This book helps children think about how the skeleton allows them to do everyday movements like walking, sitting, jumping, and leaping. Students learn important information about what our bones do, how we can keep them healthy, and how they help us grow. The final text in the unit, The Busy Body Book by Lizzy Rockwell, describes all the ways we can keep our body fit. Students learn how their bones, muscles, heart, and lungs work to get them moving, and what they need to do to keep growing strong. This unit is meant as an introduction to these ideas and assumes that students will revisit this content at other times and in other grades with increasingly more rigorous goals for internalization and application to healthy living.

What English language arts content will students learn?

Students will expand their knowledge base about:

• how to ask and answer questions about key details in a text.
• how to describe the connection between two pieces of information in a text.
• how to know and use various text features to locate key facts or information in a text.
• how to use illustrations and details in a text to describe its key ideas.
• how to distinguish between information provided by pictures or other illustrations and information provided by the words in a text.
• how to identify information that is the same and different across texts.
• how to build knowledge by connecting relevant information from one text or another.