Standards-Aligned English Lessons for Teachers
Teach reading, writing, and grammar with Gynzy lesson plans!
To help educators teach their students important skills in reading and writing, Gynzy offers hundreds of standards-aligned English lessons in our Library. These lessons are fully customizable and enriched with learning games, images, classroom activities, and widgets to keep students engaged. ELA lessons from Gynzy cover topics such as:
- Recognizing letters and decoding words
- Parts of speech and punctuation
- Reading comprehension
- Writing skills for multiple types of texts
- Researching & gathering information
- Building vocabulary
- Handwriting numbers and letters
To start customizing and delivering great ELA lessons, create a Gynzy account. Once you’ve put your personal touch on your lessons and begin presenting them on our online whiteboard, you’ll find that teaching important English skills has never been easier.
Recognizing Letters and Decoding Words
Recognizing letters and relating them to sounds is a critical part of learning to speak, understand, read, and write English. A portion of our Library is dedicated to phonics lessons to help teach students about these concepts.
Once students have gotten comfortable with these concepts, they can begin learning sight words, CVC words, and the other building blocks of early vocabulary. Our full range of lessons on these topics includes:
- Letter recognition lessons A-Z
- Decode regularly spelled one-syllable words
- Common prefixes and suffixes
- Common prefixes
- Latin suffixes
- Derivational suffixes
- Long A vowel teams
- Long E vowel teams
- Long I vowel teams
- Long O vowel teams
- Long U vowel teams
- Additional common vowel teams
- Decode two-syllable words
- Decode multisyllabic words
- Recognize and read irregularly spelled words
- One-to one letter-sound correspondences
- Consonant blends and digraphs
- Inconsistent spelling-sound correspondences
We also offer multiple games and activities to help students recognize letters, including our popular letter songs activity which includes 4 unique songs to help students learn every letter. Bingo is a fun group activity students can also use to practice recognizing letters.
Parts of Speech and Punctuation
Although language comes naturally to us, many people are intimidated by grammar. Luckily, our grammar lessons break down common grammatical concepts in a way that is visual and engaging to make the concepts accessible for students of any age!
Lessons for younger students cover foundational concepts such as writing letters, using end punctuation, and the rules of proper capitalization. There are also lessons covering proper subject-verb agreement and the difference between simple and compound sentences. Additional topics covered include:
- Common and proper nouns
- Regular and irregular verbs
- Past, present, and future verbs
- Personal pronouns
- Frequently occurring adjectives
- Frequently occurring conjunctions
- Frequently occurring prepositions
- Pronoun-antecedent agreement
- Simple, compound, and complex sentences
- Articles (a, an, the)
- Comma usage
- Commas in a series
- Commas, colons, and semicolons in a series
- Commas to separate introductory words, phrases & clauses
- Form and use possessives
- Apostrophe to form contractions
- Prepositional phrases
Our pre-made lessons are made by experienced educators and enriched with games, activities, images, and more to keep the information approachable and accessible. Try searching our Library for topics your students want to learn more about, such as “parts of speech” or “types of sentences” to find more content related to what you’re looking for.
Reading Comprehension
The ability to gather and analyze information from a text is a vital life skill. Reading skills are developed throughout one’s life, but Gynzy lessons offer an interactive and visual element that appeals to and engages students who don’t consider themselves strong readers.
An important reading skill to develop is the ability to find the main idea of a text and identify the details and facts being used to support it. Other lessons we have that help students develop their reading comprehension skills include:
- Ask and answer questions about a story
- Identify the 5Ws and how
- Identify the focus of a paragraph
- Refer to specific details to draw inferences
- Connection between scientific ideas/concepts
- Connection between series of historical events
- Distinguish between literal and nonliteral language
- Words that suggest feelings
- Sensory words
- Different points of view
- Word meanings in context
- Main Idea & Details that support it
- Identify sensory details
- Identify story elements
- Main idea and key details
- Making inferences
- Identify the main topic
- Identify the moral of the story
- Cause and effect relationships in scientific texts
- How to make connections between two ideas
We believe that reading is and should be fun. In order to give students more entertaining passages to read and analyze, we also have lessons about myths and fables. Gynzy can help any lesson plan be fun and engaging, no matter what the subject!
Writing Skills for Different Types of Texts
Writing skills help students communicate their ideas and thoughts clearly, whether in school, at home, or in other social situations. To help students develop a well-rounded toolkit of writing skills Gynzy offers lessons about:
- Six ways to start a narrative introduction
- Transition words and phrases
- Writing dialogue tags
- Recognize and correct fragments
- Recognize and correct run-ons
- Showing not telling
- Sentence types
- Using temporal words
- Structure and organize a narrative text
- State an opinion about a topic
- Connect ideas with words, phrases, and clauses
- Thesis statements
One of our most popular writing activities is our story prompts, which include 23 image prompts that students can write a story about. Try focusing on developing specific skills in your stories, or just write something fun. As long as students are writing they are learning!
Researching and Sourcing Information
Modern students are bombarded with information, and not all of it is reliable. Particularly when answering questions, finishing assignments or writing essays, it’s important to identify credible sources and use them to inform ourselves about the topic. Lessons that we have covering this important topic include:
- Gather information and take notes from print and digital sources
- Gather information from provided sources to answer questions
- Provide a list of sources
- Use experiences and provided sources to answer a question
- Gather information from experiences to answer a question
- Using credible sources
- Summarize or paraphrase in notes and finished work
- Avoiding plagiarism
Once a student has identified a credible and reliable source, paraphrasing the text can be a very useful exercise in identifying the facts supported by the source being used.
Building Vocabulary
Building our vocabulary of words is a lifelong pursuit that happens without us realizing it. There are, however, core concepts in English that we can recognize to help us understand words that are unfamiliar to us, and to expand the words we are comfortable using. Some of our lessons that cover these topics include:
- Different types of context clues
- Sentence-level context clues
- Shades of meaning among related words
- Shades of meaning among adjectives
- Shades of meaning among verbs
- Synonyms and antonyms
- Opposites of verbs and adjectives
- Compound words
- Common Greek and Latin affixes and roots
- Idioms, adages, and proverbs
- Using affixes to determine the meaning of a word
One classic game to help students continue developing their vocabulary is hangman, which allows users to create, edit and save custom word lists. Reviewing common sight words is another good way to build the foundation of a student’s vocabulary.
Reading and Writing English with Gynzy
English is a complicated language and there are many different skills and concepts students can work on to become stronger readers and writers. Luckily, our English lessons are enriched with activities, images, widgets, and more, to keep students engaged and interested in the concepts being taught, no matter where class takes place.
The ELA lessons are only a fraction of the more than 1,500 standards-aligned lesson plans on Gynzy covering topics such as:
- Math
- Science
- Social Emotional Learning
- Social Studies
- Holidays and more!
Get started today by creating a Gynzy account. This gives you the ability to create, edit and save custom English lessons on our online whiteboard.