Help your child exceed the Common Core standards with What Your First Grader Needs to Know What will your child be expected to learn in the first grade? How can you help him or her at home? How can teachers foster active, successful learning in the classroom? This book answers these all-important questions and more, offering the specific shared knowledge that hundreds of parents and teachers across the nation have agreed upon for American first graders. Filled with opportunities for reading aloud and fostering discussion, this first-grade volume of the acclaimed Core Knowledge Series presents the sort of knowledge and skills that should be at the core of a challenging first-grade education. Inside you’ll discover • Favorite poems—old and new, such as “The Owl and the Pussycat,” “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and “Thirty Days Hath September” • Beloved stories—from many times and lands, including a selection of Aesop’s fables, “Hansel and Gretel,” “All Stories Are Anansi’s,” “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” and much more • Familiar sayings and phrases—such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “Practice makes perfect” • World and American history and geography—take a trip down the Nile with King Tut and learn about the early days of our country, including the story of Jamestown, the Pilgrims, and the American Revolution • Visual arts—fun activities plus reproductions of masterworks by Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others • Music—engaging introductions to great composers and music, including classical music, opera, and jazz, as well as a selection of favorite children’s songs • Math—a variety of activities to help your child learn to count, add and subtract, solve problems, recognize geometrical shapes and patterns, and learn about telling time • Science—interesting discussions of living things and their habitats, the human body, the states of matter, electricity, our solar system, and what’s inside the earth, plus stories of famous scientists such as Thomas Edison and Rachel Carson BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from What Your Second Grader Needs to Know.

Describes and illustrates the first discoveries and settlements in North America through a variety of images produced at that time.

"Send those on land that will show themselves diligent writers." So urged the "sailing instructions" prepared for explorer Henry Hudson. With distinctive command of the primary texts created by such "diligent writers" as Columbus, William Bradford, and Thomas Jefferson, Wayne Franklin describes how the New World was created from their new words. The long verbal discovery of America, he asserts, entailed both advance and retreat, sudden insights and blind insistence on old ways of seeing. The discoverers, explorers, and settlers depicted America in words—or via maps, tables, and landscape views—as a complex spatial and political entity, a place where ancient formula and current fact were inevitably at odds.

Ideal for today's young investigative reader, each A True Book includes lively sidebars, a glossary and index, plus a comprehensive "To Find Out More" section listing books, organizations, and Internet sites. A staple of library collections since the 1950s, the new A True Book series is the definitive nonfiction series for elementary school readers.

The names “Jamestown” and “Plymouth” have become synonymous for most students of American history with “founding,” and “birth”—both, of the American nation, and of freedom and democracy themselves. In this book, author Ted Lamont asks us to reconsider our country’s formative years, and explore the stories, lives, achievements, and failures of America’s earliest founding fathers: those who paved the way for the Colonial Era, and the American Revolution. They were explorers, investors, passionate religious leaders, and determined developers who struggled for generations to successfully plant the English flag in this strange new soil. Lamont deftly details the ways in which the stories and struggles of figures like Sir Walter Raleigh, Bartholomew Gosnold, Richard Hakluyt, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and Captain John Smith were not just related, but connected in ways that help us better understand the colonies and culture born of their efforts. The infancy of America— from Roanoke’s founding in 1585 through the firm establishment of Jamestown and Plymouth in 1625—is where we first see planted the seeds of the rest of America’s colonial, economic, political, and cultural history, that was the immensely difficult, and often overlooked, first step toward the New World we are still working to perfect.