1st Grade · English Language Arts · Parent guide
Short answer. RI.1.10 means your first grader reads grade-level nonfiction with help from an adult. What appropriately complex means and how to support it at home.
Quick answer
The nonfiction twin of RL.1.10. With prompting and support, your child reads informational texts that are genuinely first grade level: animal books, science readers, simple biographies, how-to books. "With prompting and support" is part of the standard, so an adult helping with hard words and big ideas is the expected setup, not a workaround. The goal is regular time in true nonfiction, at the right stretch level, all year.
Why parents see this skill
Nonfiction reading is where kids pick up the vocabulary and background knowledge that make every future text easier, from science units to social studies chapters. Kids typically get less nonfiction than fiction at home, so this standard exists partly to correct that diet. Comfort with informational text now predicts a lot about how school feels in third grade, when textbooks arrive in force.
For reference
With prompting and support, read informational texts appropriately complex for grade 1.Official Common Core source
See it, then try it
You do not need a lesson plan. Look for these signs in ordinary play, reading, and conversation, then choose one short activity.
Let him pick a topic to become the family expert on, and gather a few books at his level about it. Read together 10 minutes a night, alternating pages. By month's end he lectures the family at dinner. The single-topic run builds vocabulary that makes each next book easier than the last.
Attach nonfiction to real moments: read the pancake recipe before Saturday breakfast, the museum map in the lobby, the animal signs at the zoo, a simple instruction sheet before building the shelf. Informational reading with an immediate payoff is the easiest kind to sell.
When he asks one of those out-of-nowhere kid questions, like why the moon changes shape, write it on a sticky note and find a kids' book that answers it at the library. Reading launched by his own question gets more effort and attention than any assigned page ever will.
Choose what helps today
Start with the domain guide for context, use the learning library when a concept needs explaining, or print a page when your child is ready to practice.
See every RI.1 skill in order and how the codes fit together.
Open resourceFilter free pages by literacy, phonics, handwriting, and comprehension skills.
Open resourceShort, repeatable reading activities for common early words.
Open resourceSimple reading and vocabulary ideas for home and classroom routines.
Open resourceHow much of our reading time should be nonfiction versus stories?
A rough half-and-half mix is the usual guidance by the elementary years, but do not turn it into accounting. If your house is currently 90 percent storybooks, just adding 2 or 3 informational books a week moves the needle plenty. Follow his obsessions, dinosaurs and volcanoes have carried millions of kids into nonfiction.
Nonfiction books seem harder than storybooks at the same level. Is that my imagination?
Not your imagination. Informational text carries more rare words and fewer story hooks, so the same child often reads a notch lower in nonfiction. That is exactly why the standard bakes in adult support. Read the heavier pages yourself, let him take the captions and the parts about his favorite animal, and the level rises over the year.
Keep the sequence
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