English
Teaching Resource
Teaching Resource
Important Canadians Read-Aloud Unit
Last updated 2025/08/22
Description
Modeled after Core Knowledge Language Arts units, this language and social studies unit is designed for use in Canadian kindergarten and Grade 1 classrooms. The unit is comprised of 10 lessons, each about an Important Canadian, with a teacher read-aloud document and accompanying slideshow for student viewing during the lessons. Explicit vocabulary instruction and comprehension questions are included.
Individuals featured include: Dan Levy, David Suzuki, Hayley Wickenheiser, Oscar Peterson, Roberta Bondar, St. Kateri Tekakwitha, Terry Fox, Tom Longboat, Viola Desmond, and Winnie the Bear.
Curriculum Connection
This unit supports Strand C of the Ontario Language Curriculum (Comprehension: Understanding and Responding to Texts).
total length
11 Comments
Share your thoughts
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Is the expectation for students to write answers to these questions or is it to share orally only.
Thank you,
Trina
Hi Trina,
As “reading and writing float on a sea of talk” (Britton, 1970), we want to provide our kindergarteners with as many oral language opportunities as possible. The expectation would be to share orally only. A framework like Zucker and Cabell’s “Strive for Five” could support making the most out of these oral language opportunities provided in this resource. You could initiate the five point conversation after students have had time to pair and share and are then sharing their thinking with the class. You can find more about this resource here:
https://onlit.org/resource/strive-for-five-conversations/
That being said, if you have a student who is ready to write about an inspiring discussion, that can be very exciting for them. I have often encouraged students who seemed ready, and inspired in discussion, to write or draw about their important ideas later on during centre time at the writing centre. I actually started doing this after a student did this very thing unprompted! It was such an organic weaving of structured learning and play! Kindergarten is so exciting somedays.
Fantastic resource! Great idea. Thank you for the hard work, Onlit team. I agree, the one-pager with all of the vocabulary words would be helpful.
This is an excellent unit. Wonderful job, team!
I am very impressed with the Important Canadians reading comprehension unit developed by ONlit. It is a valuable, ready-to-use resource for K-2 teachers and exemplifies effective comprehension instruction grounded in the science of reading. I particularly appreciate the Word Work Activities, which highlight teaching vocabulary in context and provide a model for explicit instruction. Additionally, I value how these reading comprehension lessons contribute to developing students’ writing skills. I will for sure be holding this unit up as an exemplar for the teachers of all grades in my school.
Thanks for your feedback, Paul! The team put a lot of thought and work into this resource and we’re so glad to hear that you think it will be valuable for your teachers! We’ve heard of educators using the lessons as read-alouds in the younger grades and as printouts for reading in older grades too!
Thanks for the wonderful resource.
Thank you for the Canadian content. Looking forward to sharing with students. 🙂
You’re welcome – we are excited to highlight just a small sample of the many incredible Canadians of both past and present!
Great work! Can’t wait to use this in my social studies unit in grade 1/2/
Would love a one pager with all of the vocab words in the unit included!
We’re so glad you find this valuable – and thanks for the suggestion re: the one-pager! We will add that to our to-do list!