In first grade, one very important part of our curriculum is practicing Responsive Classroom. Responsive Classroom is a student-centered, social and emotional learning approach to teaching and discipline. Our day 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. Our school day ends with a closing circle to reflect on our learning and provide students with an opportunity to say goodbye to each other.
We use Reading Streets as our core curriculum for comprehension. Students read a variety of decodable fiction and non fiction books and passages to build fluency. We also work on reading comprehension skills. These skills include; predicting, inferencing, retelling the beginning, middle, and end of a story, as well as identifying the characters, setting, problem, and solution.
Letterland is our phonics and spelling program. It introduces students to characters that represent each letter of the alphabet to help them learn letter sounds. Students then work on segmenting and blending words. I use supplemental resources like UFLI to reinforce spelling rules and conventions, including digraphs, silent e, vowel teams and r-controlled vowels.
Handwriting Without Tears is the writing program I use for teaching letter and number formation. I also use their Building Writers book to apply those handwriting skills and build core writing skills. In first grade we learn to write opinion pieces, different forms of informational writing and narrative stories.
This year our district has adopted the Illustrative Mathematics Program. By the end of first grade, 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 taught in first grade include recognizing and manipulating different kinds of 2D and 3D shapes, telling time to the hour and half hour, using both standard and non-standard forms of measurement, recording and interpreting data on different types of graphs, and an introduction to place value.
Some of our science units of study include insects, patterns in the sky, plant and animal adaptations, light and sound, and engineering. During social studies first graders learn about citizenship, community members, Colonial life, needs and wants, US symbols, mapping, and economics.