Unit 2 — My Family, My Community
Description
Students explore family structures and community roles through reading informational texts. They identify main topics, retell key details, and describe connections between individuals and events. Writing focuses on informative/explanatory text in the form of descriptive essays about people and places. Phonics instruction covers consonants l, h and short o. Students learn to use text features to locate information and apply vocabulary strategies such as identifying antonyms. The unit emphasizes sentence composition with proper capitalization, matching punctuation, and using determiners and adjectives.
Essential Questions
- How does everyone in my family and community make them special?
Learning Objectives
- Describe characters, settings, and major events in stories using key details.
- Use illustrations and details in stories to describe characters and settings.
- Describe connections between individuals, events, ideas, or information in texts.
- Know and use text features to locate information.
- Identify reasons an author gives to support points in a text.
- Decode regularly spelled one-syllable words.
- Write informative texts naming a topic and supplying facts.
- Use common, proper, and possessive nouns.
- Use singular and plural nouns with matching verbs.
- Use frequently occurring adjectives and determiners.
Suggested Texts
- Whose Hands Are These? — informational text (week 1)
- Kids Speak Up! — opinion writing (week 1)
- Dan Had a Plan — realistic fiction (week 1)
- Maybe Something Beautiful — realistic fiction (week 2)
- On the Map! — informational text (week 2)
- Places in My Neighborhood — informational text (week 2)
- Abuela — fantasy (week 3)
- Who Put the Cookies in the Cookie Jar? — informational text (week 3)
- Curious About Jobs — video (week 3)
Supplemental Resources
- Printed word lists for consonants l, h and short o phonics
- Graphic organizers for descriptive essays with boxes for main idea and supporting details
- Sentence strips for building sentences with adjectives and determiners
- Index cards for sorting words into categories (places, people, actions)
- Pictures or photographs of community helpers and family situations for vocabulary discussion
Language
Reading: Informational Text
Reading: Literature
Writing
Students in Unit 2 explore family structures, community helpers, and local environments. They read informational texts about communities, neighborhoods, and the roles people play in building strong family and community relationships.
Formative Assessments
- Weekly comprehension quizzes on text details and main ideas
- Text feature identification activities with headings and table of contents
- Response to text: writing plans and descriptions
- Teacher observation of small group guided reading
- Writing conferences during descriptive essay drafting
Summative Assessment
End of Unit Assessment; Write an informative/expository response describing a family member or community helper
Benchmark Assessment
— not configured —
Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding through oral retelling of a story about family or community with teacher support, or by matching pictures to key details instead of written responses. Visual supports such as character and setting cards, word banks with adjectives, and sentence frames may be provided to support sentence composition.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
During reading of informational texts about families and communities, provide visual supports such as picture-supported text and graphic organizers to help students identify the main topic and key details. For the descriptive essay, allow students to respond through drawing, dictation, or oral explanation as alternatives to independent writing, and accept partial sentences or labeled illustrations as demonstrations of understanding. When practicing consonant sounds and short o, offer extended time and repetition in a small group or one-on-one setting, using manipulatives or sound-picture cards to reinforce decoding. For comprehension checks, read questions aloud and accept oral responses so that writing demands do not obscure what a student understands about community roles and family structures.
Section 504
Provide preferential seating during shared reading of informational texts to minimize distraction and support focus on text features such as headings and captions. Allow extended time on comprehension checks and writing tasks related to the descriptive essay, and offer a quiet or low-distraction setting when available. Printed copies of any directions or sentence frames used during writing instruction should be provided at the student's workspace so they can reference expectations without relying on memory.
ELL / MLL
Build background knowledge about family structures and community roles using photos, illustrations, and realia before introducing informational texts, and pre-teach key content vocabulary such as community, helper, and neighborhood using picture dictionaries or bilingual word banks. Provide simplified, step-by-step directions for writing tasks and encourage students to sketch or label ideas in their home language as a bridge to English composition. When practicing antonyms or adjectives, connect new vocabulary to familiar words and concrete images so that language learning is grounded in meaningful context related to the unit theme.
At Risk (RTI)
Connect the unit's informational texts to students' own family experiences and familiar community helpers to activate prior knowledge and build engagement before reading begins. During guided reading, use shorter text passages and focus attention on one or two key details at a time, reinforcing the connection between illustrations and the main topic. For descriptive writing, provide a simple planning frame with picture prompts so that students can organize their ideas about a person or place before composing sentences, reducing the cognitive load of generating and recording ideas simultaneously. Celebrate approximations in phonics and writing to build confidence and reinforce that partially decoded words and developing sentences show real growth.
Gifted & Talented
Encourage students to explore how different text features — such as captions, headings, and diagrams — work together to convey information, and challenge them to evaluate why an author might have chosen certain details about a community role or family structure over others. In their descriptive writing, invite students to go beyond naming facts by explaining the significance of the person or place they describe and how that individual contributes to the community, pushing toward analytical expression within an informative frame. Students may also explore a broader range of adjectives and determiners to craft more precise descriptions, and can be encouraged to compare family or community structures across texts, developing early skills in synthesis and interpretation.