Central Focus Exemplars
The central focus is to tie a spring these into the content areas of ELA and science. Each lesson
in the unit will have an anchor book that the lesson will be based off of. For ELA, students will
learn about rhyming words, specifically targeting words such as burrow, den, marsh, and
cocoon from the book Spring Song. For science, students will learn about the parts of a flower
by reading the book Zinnia’s Flower Garden along with planting their own seed. As the seed
begins to grow, students will draw a picture of what the seed looks like and label the parts of the
seed that are beginning to grow.
Central Focus: Students will be introduced to the idea of healthy eating and will be challenged to
think about healthy choices that they can make in their own lives. Through the use of various
realistic and fiction works and hands-on activities, children will cover the idea of healthy eating
across various content areas including the Center for Disease Control (CDC)’s National Health
Standards, ELA, and Social Studies, and Science.
The central focus is to tie a flower theme into the content areas of ELA, Art, Math and Science.
Each lesson in the unit will incorporate a book that sparks the lesson. In math, the
kindergarteners will practice counting and sorting different types of seeds after reading I’m a
Seed. In science, we will read Five Tough and Tiny Seeds, then the students will be using all
the academic language over the lessons to plant their own seed and grow a flower. By the end
of the lesson sequence the kindergarteners will be able to count and sort proficiently, name the
5 main parts of a flower using new academic language and grow their own flower.
The central focus is to implement healthy eating into the students’ lives through the content areas of
ELA, Health, and Art. Each lesson in the unit will have an anchor book for the lesson to be based off
of. For Art and ELA, the Kindergarten students will create illustrations of words that rhymes together
based off of the book I Can’t Eat This Stuff. For Health and ELA, after the class has watched the
read aloud video of Daniel Tries a New Food, the students will pick healthy foods that they know of,
write the names of the foods down, and will mark each word phonetically. By the end of this unit, the
Kindergarten students will be able to understand the difference between food that is healthy and
unhealthy, correctly pronounce works phonetically, and identify rhyming words.