Course Description
Literacy skills are developed through a language-rich curriculum that focuses on stories, poems, and songs. Students progress through learning how to print upper- and lowercase letters to a study of word families and consonant blends. The imagination is sparked through fairy tales, nature stories, and traditional verses as your child develops the necessary skills and confidence to read independently. In Social Studies, students begin to develop a sense of time and place as they encounter classic tales, make their own calendars, and draw maps of their neighborhoods. Multicultural awareness is explored through community connections and a developing sense of good citizenship. In the Math curriculum, stories are integrated into the study of numbers, and objects from nature collected on a walk become part of learning the four mathematical processes. Students also explore sequences, patterns, counting money, and geometric shapes. Science, Arts & Crafts, Music, and Health round out the First Grade experience. Each week students engage in observations of the natural world, express themselves through painting and crafts, develop their recorder playing skills, and conduct inquiries into topics related to their healthy development.
Major Concepts
Language Arts/Social Studies
Major Concepts
Language Arts/Social Studies
- Uppercase and lowercase letters
- Long and short vowel sounds
- Fairy tales and poetry
- Phonics
- Printing Words
- Form drawing
- Word families
- Independent reading
- Writing out sentences
- Consonant blends
- Word games
- Phases of the moon
- Life cycle of the seed
- Animal tracks
- Cloud formations
- Animal behavior
- Decidious and coniferous trees
- Hibernation
- Arctic and Antartic
- Growing an indoor plant
- Pond and forest life
- Birds
- Vegetable garden
- Scientific inquiry
- Operations of Math
- Manipulatives
- Numbers 10 - 80
- Equation introduction
- Counting by two, five, and ten
- Ordinal numbers
- Length, weight, and size
- Patterns and Sequences
- Counting and sorting money
- Geomeetric forms
- Knitting, maintaining a seasonal display, wet paper watercolor, nature crafts and creative sand and water play
- Singing and movement exercises, recorder play