Curriculum

In first grade one very important part of our curriculum is using the Responsive Classroom to build a positive, respectful learning environment. Everyday begins with a morning meeting which includes a greeting, share time, group activity and morning message. The meeting often includes a movement and/or song, an opportunity to go over the daily schedule and simple calendar work. Each day ends with a closing meeting to reflect on the day and provide students with an opportunity to say goodbye to each other.

We use Reading Streets as our core curriculum for comprehension. Students read leveled fiction and non fiction books to build fluency and work on comprehension skills. These skills include; predicting, retelling the beginning, middle, and end of a story, characters, setting, problem, and solution.

Letterland is our phonics and spelling program. During Letterland students meet characters that represent each letter of the alphabet to help them learn letter sounds. Students work on segmenting and blending words. They also learn digraphs, silent e, vowel teams and r-controlled vowels including rules for spelling.

Writing: In first grade students learn to write an opinion piece, an informational writing and a narrative story.

Math: We use the Eureka math program. Students are expected to become fluent with their addition and subtraction facts to ten, and work with combinations to 20. Students are also expected to read, write and count numbers to 120, Other math concepts include; 2D and 3D shapes, time to the hour and half hour, measurement, graphing and place value.

Some of our science units include: insects, patterns in the sky, animals adaptations, light and sound, and engineering. During social studies first graders learn about Colonial life, needs and wants, US symbols, mapping, and economics.